rationalwp

Rational SEO provides 100% of the technical SEO requirements for modern sites with 0% of the database bloat, UI clutter, or performance drag.
<h4>Philosophy</h4>
Rational SEO rigorously rejects features that do not directly influence search engines or social crawlers:
<ul>
<li>No Content Scoring – No traffic lights, readability checks, or keyword density counters</li>
<li>No Dashboard – No “SEO Overview” widget or React-powered admin home</li>
<li>No Analytics – No ranking tracking or Google Search Console API integrations</li>
<li>No Frontend Assets – Zero CSS or JS files loaded on the frontend</li>
<li>No 404 Logging – Never writes 404 hits to the database</li>
</ul>
<h4>Features</h4>
Meta Tags
<ul>
<li>Custom title tags with configurable separator</li>
<li>Meta descriptions (manual or auto-generated from excerpt/content)</li>
<li>Robots meta (index/noindex control)</li>
<li>Canonical URLs</li>
<li>Google and Bing verification meta tags</li>
</ul>
Social Media
<ul>
<li>Open Graph tags (og:title, og:description, og:image, og:url, og:type, og:locale, og:site_name)</li>
<li>Twitter Cards (summary or summary_large_image)</li>
<li>Per-post social image override</li>
</ul>
Structured Data
<ul>
<li>JSON-LD schema output using @graph format</li>
<li>Organization or Person schema (configurable)</li>
<li>WebSite schema with publisher linking</li>
<li>WebPage schema</li>
<li>Article schema on posts/pages with author, dates, and images</li>
</ul>
XML Sitemaps
<ul>
<li>Sitemap index at /sitemap.xml</li>
<li>Per-post-type sitemaps with pagination</li>
<li>Transient caching with stale-while-revalidate</li>
<li>Content freshness filtering (exclude old content)</li>
<li>Post type exclusions</li>
</ul>
Editor Integration
<ul>
<li>Meta box on all public post types</li>
<li>Custom SEO title and description fields</li>
<li>Focus keyword field with real-time presence indicators (title, description, first paragraph, URL slug)</li>
<li>Noindex toggle per post</li>
<li>Canonical URL override</li>
<li>Social image override</li>
<li>Taxonomy term SEO fields (title, description, noindex, canonical)</li>
</ul>
Post Type Archives
<ul>
<li>Custom SEO title and description for each post type archive</li>
<li>Configure via Settings > Rational SEO > Archives tab</li>
</ul>
AI Assistant (optional)
<ul>
<li>AI-powered focus keyword suggestions</li>
<li>AI-generated SEO titles and meta descriptions</li>
<li>One-click “Suggest All” for keyword, title, and description together</li>
<li>Uses OpenAI GPT-4o-mini (requires your own API key)</li>
<li>Data sent only when you click — never in the background</li>
</ul>
<h3>External Services</h3>
This plugin connects to the following external services:
<h4>RationalWP Plugin Directory</h4>
This plugin fetches a list of available RationalWP plugins from <a href="https://rationalwp.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">rationalwp.com</a> to display in the WordPress admin menu. Only the menu file version number is sent as a cache-busting query parameter. No user data is transmitted. The response is cached locally for 24 hours.
<ul>
<li>Service URL: <a href="https://rationalwp.com/plugins.json" rel="nofollow ugc">https://rationalwp.com/plugins.json</a></li>
<li>Terms of Service: <a href="https://rationalwp.com/terms/" rel="nofollow ugc">https://rationalwp.com/terms/</a></li>
<li>Privacy Policy: <a href="https://rationalwp.com/privacy/" rel="nofollow ugc">https://rationalwp.com/privacy/</a></li>
</ul>
<h4>OpenAI API (optional)</h4>
This plugin provides optional AI-powered SEO suggestions using the <a href="https://openai.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">OpenAI API</a>. When a site administrator configures an OpenAI API key in Settings > Rational SEO > General, users can click “Suggest” or “Generate” buttons in the post editor to receive AI-generated focus keywords, SEO titles, and meta descriptions.
Data is only sent when a user explicitly clicks an AI suggestion button. The data sent includes the post title and up to 2000 characters of post content (stripped of HTML), along with the user’s own API key for authentication. No data is sent automatically or in the background.
<ul>
<li>Service URL: <a href="https://api.openai.com/v1/chat/completions" rel="nofollow ugc">https://api.openai.com/v1/chat/completions</a></li>
<li>Terms of Use: <a href="https://openai.com/policies/terms-of-use/" rel="nofollow ugc">https://openai.com/policies/terms-of-use/</a></li>
<li>Privacy Policy: <a href="https://openai.com/policies/privacy-policy/" rel="nofollow ugc">https://openai.com/policies/privacy-policy/</a></li>
</ul>

RationalSEO

Technical SEO essentials with zero bloat. No dashboards, analytics, content scoring, or frontend assets.

Marcus (aka @msykes)

Marcus

Pixelite

Meta Tags Manager is a powerful yet simple, lightweight plugin which allows you to add custom meta tags to your site. Features include:
<ul>
<li>Supports meta tags including the name, property, http-equiv, charset and itemprop attributes.</li>
<li>Choose from predefined types, such as ‘name=”keyword”‘ or create your own by typing it in.</li>
<li>Add meta tags to specific posts, choose what Custom Post Types to support from our settings page.</li>
<li>Add global meta tags that will display on specific CPTs, Taxonomies, your front page or your whole site.</li>
<li>Automatically add Open Graph details to your home page.</li>
<li>Automatically add Schema and Structured Data to your home page.</li>
<li>Add Google Sitelinks and Sitelinks Search markup.</li>
<li>Easily add verification codes for services like Facebook, Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster Tools, Yandex and more (or… create your own custom meta tags!).</li>
</ul>
Use cases include:
<ul>
<li>Adding Google and Yahoo site verification tags</li>
<li>Adding additional open graph, twitter card or other social media meta info not supported by other SEO/Meta plugins</li>
</ul>
<a href="https://metatagmanager.com/gopro/?utm_source=plugin-readme&utm_medium=plugin&utm_campaign=plugin" rel="nofollow ugc">Go Pro</a> for many newly added features, including:
<ul>
<li>Dynamic placeholders to include data about the page being displayed, such as page title, comment count, thumbnail URLs and more!</li>
<li>Additional contexts to add global meta tags, as well as exclusion rules for finer-grained controls.</li>
<li>Shortcode support within meta descriptions, allowing for more dynamic data insertion with plugins such as ACF</li>
<li>Unique tag detaction of Meta Tag Manager tags with hierarchical precedence, avoid creating duplicate meta tags.</li>
<li>Taxonomy support – create meta tags for individual taxonomy term pages such as a single tag or category.</li>
<li>More to come! Go Pro now and get an early-bird discount of up to 50%!</li>
</ul>

Meta Tag Manager

Easily add and manage custom meta tags to various parts of your site or on individual posts, such as Yahoo and Google verification tags.

RationalSEO vs Meta Tag Manager