ACS SEO Plus

Description

ACS SEO Plus covers the on-page basics without asking you to connect an account, install a wizard or learn a new vocabulary. Open a post, fill in the fields you care about, and leave the rest empty: every field falls back to something WordPress already knows.

It also counts page views on your own server, so you can see which entry is being read without adding a third party script to your pages.

What it does

• SEO title, meta description and canonical URL for every public post type.
• noindex and nofollow checkboxes per entry. Marking an entry noindex also removes it from the sitemap.
• Open Graph and Twitter Card tags, with a share image chosen per entry, then the featured image, then a site wide fallback.
• JSON-LD structured data: a WebSite graph with a search action on the front page, and BlogPosting on every post (on by default for new installs), or WebPage on the other entries you opt in.
• A title and description for the front page, used for the page head and the share tags, so a static front page is shared as your site rather than as a page called “Home”.
• Site verification tags for Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, printed on the front page.
• An optional Google Analytics 4 tag, loaded only when you enter a measurement ID.
• An XML sitemap at its own address, so it never takes over the sitemap WordPress or another plugin already publishes. You choose which post types it covers.
• Page view counts per entry: today, yesterday, this month and all time, in the editor, in the post list and on an overview screen.

About the view counting

It runs entirely on your site. There is no cookie, no stored IP address and no request to any outside service. To recognise a repeat visit within the same day the plugin keeps a one way hash of the visitor address and browser string in the site cache for 24 hours; the hash is discarded after that and cannot be turned back into the original values. Only totals per entry are stored, never a log of individual visits. Views by logged in editors and by obvious crawlers are skipped.

Because the count happens in PHP, a full page cache will hide some views from it. That is expected, and it is the trade-off for not loading a tracking script.

No strings attached

This plugin is complete on its own. Nothing in it is locked, metered, time limited or reserved for a paid tier, it never asks for a licence key or an account, and by default it makes no outside requests at all. The only outside service it can load is the optional Google Analytics 4 tag, and only after the site owner enters a measurement ID. Longer range traffic reports, referrer and device breakdowns, automatic image alt text and redirect management are sold separately as an add-on at ACS Developer (https://acs-developer.com/acs-seo-plus/). The add-on is not included here and this plugin does not check for it.

External services

This plugin can load one outside service, and only when the site owner explicitly sets it up.

Google Analytics 4 (Google tag) — When a measurement ID is entered under ACS SEO Plus > Settings > Site verification and analytics, the front end of the site loads https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js in the visitor’s browser. Google then receives the page address, referrer, browser and device details and an identifier cookie set by Google, as described in Google’s documentation. Nothing is loaded while the field is empty, and by default nothing is loaded for logged in editors. The site owner is responsible for telling visitors about it in the privacy policy and for any consent their law requires.
Terms of service: https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/analytics/terms/us/
Privacy policy: https://policies.google.com/privacy

The Search Console and Bing verification fields only print a meta tag with the value you enter. They do not contact any service.

Technical details