9 months ago, Scott Offord and Faison Zutavern of the Orion Group released the plugin SEO Extended. 19,000 downloads later, Orion Group’s first WordPress plugin is now a part of the plugin that it enhanced, WordPress SEO by Yoast!
SEO Extended solved an issue that Scott, Co-owner and Director of Internet Marketing Services, ran into too often when signing on new clients: The client had many pages and blog posts, but no SEO Titles or Meta Descriptions. Using our SEO plugin of choice, WordPress SEO by Yoast, we would have to update each SEO Title and Meta Description one page at a time. That isn’t too bad if there are only a dozen or so pages, but we were dealing with several dozen pages and posts!
Scott envisioned a page in WordPress that would list out each page, post, and custom post type and allow him to edit each SEO Title in one spot and each Meta Description in another. With the help of Faison, Lead Web Developer, SEO Extended was developed and released in time for WordCamp Milwaukee 2013.
SEO Extended was popular, being installed anywhere between 50 and 120 times per day. Its popularity even reached Joost de Valk, creator of WordPress SEO by Yoast, who emailed Scott asking if we would be willing to merge the functionality into his plugin. So Faison spent many hours on GitHub, working with Yoast contributor Juliette, to merge and test the functionality of SEO Extended into WordPress SEO.
9 months, 19,000 downloads, and 42 commits later brings us to today. Joost de Valk announced version 1.5 of WordPress SEO by Yoast and the effort from Orion Group in mergin SEO Extended into the core code of WordPress SEO by Yoast.
So please, uninstall SEO Extended and update WordPress SEO by Yoast and enjoy saving some time updating SEO Titles and Meta Descriptions on us!