Welcome to the site.
There are
two fundamental problems that affect
all WordPress "SEO" plugins:
1. Unreasonable use of server resources.
Pretty much every so-called "SEO" plugin created for WordPress requires functions that both slow down a site and abuse the server its on.
This can include:
(1) a high number of calls to the database,
(2) linking to external servers, including crawling Google, and
(3) "phoning home" to some SEO service.
What happens is the WordPress scripts will create unnecessary concurrent connections to the MySQL database, as well as eat into RAM or CPU. Many of these plugins are really poorly coded, and can cause not just unnecessarily high resource use, but can create kernel panics on the server OS.
SEO plugins are easily the #1 reason WordPress blog owners get "kicked off" of shared hosts. These plugins use more resources than is reasonable for the average website. In order to run such things, you'd need a VPS or dedicated server. Even then, there's no way to avoid slowing down the site or the side effects of poor coding.
2. Everything can be manually done, and in a better way.
Most SEO is simply one of two things:
(1) SEO-friendly code written into a theme, such as proper use of headlines or page titles, and
(2) Intelligent writing by the owner of the blog.
Many SEO plugin users tend to be affiliate spammers/sploggers, and generally put very little effort into their sites. The poor attempt to make sites rank higher in SERPs (search engine results pages) is to use plugins in the hopes that these scripts will somehow magically overcome their crappy content.
With just a little effort, the theme can be altered to have better page titles. Or the writer can train himself or herself to write better copy (articles, editorials, essays) and headlines that draw the desired audience. This assumes the person wants to put forth actual effort, and create a useful website, and not just web spam.
My review of Keyword Winner:
Keyword Winner is no winner that I can see. The site is one large spam piece, with annoying auto-playing video, and several feet of near useless "marketing copy" (overly flowery words, talking about how you'll get rich, etc). Successful businesses don't really use silly little plugins like this -- they either hire or become their own quality developer. Or use a known
SEO-friendly theme, such as StudioPress Genesis framework. (More on that in a minute.)
Keyword Winner promises to:
(1) Add keyword research tools in the WP admin. Great! You just slowed down your site. Google considers site speed as one area of ranking, so you've basically just screwed yourself by having site-slowing junk. That's no good.
(2) Automatically "help" you with blog post titles. Great! Just what we needed, more computer-made Engrish that is built from words instead of thoughts. Until computers turn into artificial intelligence on par with what we see in movies, the sentences/phrases built by them will be little more than gibberish based on algorithms written by computer programmers -- or people who already tend to not have very good command of language.
This is probably one of the worst SEO plugins I've ever seen, to be honest.
Skip SEO plugins, get a good theme instead!
I've built several successful sites using little more than
StudioPress and some of my own custom tweaks to the SEO aspects of the themes. For example, the title of a blog should have more than the puny default written into most themes. On one site, I've replaced the standard title code with this:
PHP Code:
<title>
<?php wp_title(''); ?><?php if(wp_title('', false)) { echo ' – '; } ?>
<?php bloginfo('name'); ?><?php if (is_home()) { echo ' – '; bloginfo('description'); } ?>
</title>
Now it says something that better reflects the content of the site, not just "Home" or "About" or whatever lousy information the theme developer wrote into it. And such a little change can have a big impact on your SEO and search rankings. It's really not even hard to do, with a little effort and learning how WordPress works (including learning a little bit of PHP).
Good theme developers, such as Brian Gardner of
StudioPress (formerly Revolution Themes), have taken all of these factors into consideration. You really should
check out the StudioPress themes, if you want to spend a few dollars on something helpful. Most of them are $99 each, use for as many sites as you want.
If you need to do keyword research, then use the Google AdWords tool. There are also quite a few other methods available, such as the free and pay versions of
Link-Assistant software (SEO Spyglass, Rank Tracker, Link Assistant, or the Power Suite). None of these methods will slow down your site in the process, or force otherwise unnecessary tools to coexist within the production/live version of your blog.
I would not waste a penny on Keyword Winner. I would not even use it if it were free.
That's my advice to you.
