New Kid On The Block

Premium SEO Rizer is the brand new and highly touted SEO plugin for WordPress that promises to do more, and do it better. Whether or not it lives up to that hype remains to be seen, though early reviews seem to show that it has went beyond the basic functions that we're used to seeing in these types of plugins.

Unlike the first two we discussed there is no free version of SEO Rizer available. Its also not available via the basic WordPress repository like other free plugins. Instead you have to purchase it directly from the developer's site. Also, since it's still new there isn't a lot of data from which to compare it's effectiveness and compatibility, especially in comparison to the other two.

From the developers we know that these are the basic modules included in the plugin:
Backlink Builder
Google Analytics
Link Builder
301 Link Redirect
Social Stats
W3C Validator
PageSpeed Insights
Local SEO
Monitor 404
Mass Optimization
SEO Friendly Images
SERP
Sitemaps
Title & Meta Format

So, at first blush we can see that there's considerably more meat on this bone than we saw on the others. And some of these are quite significant additions. This plugin is being so highly regarded by some because it is so robust that it effectively allows bloggers to remove many of their other plugins, reducing the number of plugins on your site which could help improve its speed.

A few of these need to be highlighted because they go well beyond what we're used to with SEO plugins.

First, Premium SEO Rizer comes with a Backlink Builder module. That is, is has the capability of going to external Directories and bookmarking your site, giving you valuable backlinks.

Unlike the others, you can also connect your blogs directly with Google Analytics and Webmaster tools and have your site metrics right their from your dashboard.

Now you can also see, at a glance, how many social signals each page or post has at the major social networks, again, right from your dashboard.

Thanks to the built-in W3C Validator and PageSpeed Insights integration, you can measure and tweak your blog, again right from the dashboard.

Finally, there's a section in this plugin to optimize your blog for Google Local Searches by adding relevant data such as address and contact information and Google Map data.

There's more to this plugin (see a full review here), but these few highlight the point of this article, that perhaps there is a new leader among WordPress SEO plugins that also comes in at a price point well below the others, at $27. Like Yoast, it also has the SEO section in the Content Creation page so that when you're writing new posts or pages you can quickly see how you're doing in terms of keyword density, title tags, meta data, etc...

It remains to be seen how this one will stand up over time to the previous kings of SEO, but at the very least its a promising sign to bloggers that help is on the way and developers are stepping up to the plate in order to help us keep up with the challenging task of earning good search engine rankings. Here's a video review which has a walk-through of this plugin so you can see the plugin first-hand.