WordPress.com adds “advanced” SEO tools, and it’ll make you smile

You’ve heard that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. To that cliché we can add another: Advanced SEO is in the eye of the beholder, too.

WordPress.com announced Monday a small set of what it’s calling “Advanced SEO Tools,” and if you’ve been doing SEO for even a little while now, it should make you smile. It’s a trio of tools that includes

• the ability to write custom meta descriptions for blog posts;
• the ability to write custom title elements for different pages, such as having some page titles formatted as Post Title | Site Name and other page titles formatted as Site Name | Tagline; and
  
• a preview tool that shows how a URL will look in Google’s search results, or when shared on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

If you’re a WordPress.org user — i.e., you run WordPress as your content management system for a self-hosted website — these are basic tools offering functionality that can be found via almost any popular SEO plugin. But these tools are built for WordPress.com Business Plan users, a group that likely consists of small business owners and others who’ve never had a website before and have little understanding of what SEO is all about.

So don’t laugh at what WordPress.com calls “advanced” SEO tools. Instead, just smile about it and be reminded that what’s basic to most SEOs is still advanced to almost everybody else.