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Complete Documentation

NexalSEO documentation

Every feature of the free Nexal SEO plugin and the Nexal SEO Pro add-on, on one page — what it does, how to use it, and why it exists: the search-engine principle behind it, grounded in Google’s own publicly filed patents rather than opinion.

Legend: Free ships in the free plugin on unlimited sites  ·  Pro is part of Nexal SEO Pro  ·  Coming soon is in active development and previewed inside Pro.

The foundation

01 How NexalSEO thinks about SEO

Modern search engines don’t rank a page for a keyword in isolation. They resolve it as an entity with a place in a topic, weigh the links pointing to and from it by how likely a real reader is to follow them, and reward sites that cover a subject completely and connect their pages into a coherent structure. Every module below maps to one of those behaviours.

Where a feature reflects a documented search-engine mechanism, we cite the relevant public Google patent so you can read the source yourself rather than taking our word for it. The two we lean on most:

The Reasonable Surfer model

US 8,005,643 B2 — Google. A link is weighted by the probability a real reader actually clicks it, based on its position, its anchor text, and the surrounding context — not counted equally like classic PageRank. This is the basis for how NexalSEO evaluates anchor text and internal links.

PageRank & link-equity flow

US 6,285,999 B1 — the original ranking patent. Authority flows through links, and pages closer to well-linked hubs receive more of it and are crawled sooner. This is why click-depth and internal-link structure matter, and what the Pro engines optimise for.

Note: patents describe mechanisms search engines have published, not guarantees of ranking. NexalSEO applies these principles as sensible defaults; results always depend on your content and competition.

02 Titles & Meta Free

Focus keywords, SEO title & meta description

Set up to three focus keywords per post, page, product, category or tag, each colour-coded by optimisation level. Write a custom SEO title and meta description, or let the plugin build them from templates. A full Google-style snippet preview (desktop and mobile, with the search box and tabs) shows exactly how the result will look.

The logic: the title and description are the two elements Google most often rewrites when they’re weak or missing. Getting them right, and seeing the real pixel-truncation before you publish, is the single highest-leverage on-page task — so it’s front and centre, on every content type, not just posts.

Homepage & archive overrides

Dedicated title/description fields for the homepage, plus the same SEO fields on category and tag archives — pages most plugins leave with a bare, auto-generated title.

The logic: category and tag archives are often a site’s strongest topical hub pages. Leaving them with a default “Category: X” title wastes real ranking surface, so NexalSEO treats them as first-class SEO pages.

Robots controls & the Nexal SEO score column

Per-page noindex/nofollow toggles, plus a live SEO score shown as a column right in the Posts, Pages and Products lists so you can spot weak content without opening each item.

The logic: thin or duplicate pages dilute a site’s overall quality signal. Being able to scan a whole list and see which pages score low — and index only what deserves to rank — keeps that signal strong.

03 Semantic authority & analysis Free

Three signals score a page against its topic, not just its keyword — computed entirely on your own server with no external calls. They update live in the block-editor sidebar as you write. These metrics measure topical structure and coverage, optimizing for the search-engine mechanisms Google describes in its own patents.

Topical Completeness

NexalSEO builds a local topic model from the other posts already published in the same category — the core terms and phrases they share (local TF-IDF) — then measures how much of that vocabulary your draft actually covers, counting only words used inside real sentences, not stuffed lists. The sidebar shows which core terms are present and which are still missing.

The logic: Google’s information-retrieval and Knowledge-Graph patents describe evaluating how thoroughly a document covers the entities and sub-topics a query implies. A page that answers the whole topic — not just repeats the keyword — is the one treated as an authority. Completeness measures exactly that gap.

Cluster Health

A five-point internal-linking check: does the page link to at least one related article, does that link stay inside the same topic cluster, is the anchor text descriptive rather than generic (“click here”), is anchor text varied instead of exact-match repeated, and do the page’s outbound links stay focused on the cluster instead of scattering across unrelated topics.

The logic: the Reasonable Surfer model (US 8,005,643) weights a link by how likely a reader is to follow it — descriptive, in-context, varied anchors in relevant places carry more weight than generic or off-topic ones. Cluster Health scores your links the way that model would.

Semantic Structure

A six-point heading check: exactly one H1 (no duplicate buried in the body), content genuinely broken into passages with subheadings, the first subheading is an H2, no skipped heading levels, subheadings varied rather than keyword-stuffed, and at least one subheading phrased as a real question.

The logic: search engines index individual passages and pull answers from them for featured snippets and “People Also Ask”. A clean heading hierarchy with a question in it makes those passages retrievable — a flat wall of text hides them.

One blended score, per keyword

The three signals form a topic-level score, independent of any single keyword, which is blended with the on-page optimisation score for whichever focus keyword you’ve selected. Click a different keyword and the score, the completeness terms and the AI suggestions all recalculate instantly.

The logic: “does this cover the topic” and “is it optimised for this specific query” are two different questions. Blending them gives one honest number instead of a keyword-density figure that rewards repetition.

04 AI assist — bring your own key Free

AI topical phrases & “questions to answer”

Connect your own Gemini, Groq, OpenRouter, OpenAI or Anthropic API key and NexalSEO can enrich the local topic model with AI-suggested phrases and real “People Also Ask”-style questions for your focus keyword. Results are cached per keyword, so the same keyword always returns the same set. It only ever runs when you click “Re-analyze with AI” — never on page load, autosave or cron.

The logic: the local engine sees only your content; an LLM adds the phrasing and questions real searchers use that your draft hasn’t covered yet. Making it strictly manual and bring-your-own-key means no surprise costs and no data leaving your site unless you ask for it.

AI-verified NAP check & “Write with AI” for llms.txt

The Local SEO tab can run an optional AI pass over your name/address/phone consistency, and the AI tab can draft an llms.txt from your site’s schema identity plus your published pages and recent posts — both manual, both using your key.

The logic: these are one-off, judgement-heavy tasks where an LLM genuinely helps, and both are gated behind an explicit button so the plugin’s default behaviour stays fully local.

06 Schema & structured data Free

One connected @graph, not scattered snippets

Instead of printing separate JSON-LD blocks, NexalSEO outputs a single @graph where every node has an @id and references the others: Organization or Person (your Knowledge Graph identity, with knowsAbout topics) → WebSite → WebPage → Article or Product → author Person → BreadcrumbList. Nothing is duplicated — the Article’s image, publisher and page all point back to shared nodes. 21 schema types are available.

The logic: search engines resolve structured data as an entity graph. Disconnected snippets force them to guess how your Organization, page and author relate; an explicitly connected graph states it, which is exactly how Google’s Knowledge-Graph and entity patents describe reconciling facts across a document.

Real author entities & FAQ block

Every Article links to a proper Person node — bio, avatar and sameAs profile links from the WordPress user — instead of a bare author string. A native FAQ block renders clean HTML on the front end and emits validatable FAQPage JSON-LD connected to the same page node.

The logic: a named, linked author entity is the structured-data half of E-E-A-T; a connected FAQ node is eligible for rich results without being an isolated, orphaned script.

Enriched Product & connected LocalBusiness

For WooCommerce: brand entity, GTIN, the full gallery, aggregateRating with real approved reviews, and an Offer with priceValidUntil/itemCondition/seller. If you fill the Local SEO tab, the LocalBusiness node links back to your Organization with branchOf instead of creating a second, duplicate identity. Speakable and inLanguage are set too.

The logic: these are the exact fields Google’s Merchant/Product and LocalBusiness guidance check for, and re-using one identity via branchOf avoids splitting your entity’s authority across two competing nodes.

07 Social / Open Graph Free

Open Graph & Twitter Card tags

Open Graph and Twitter Card meta for every page, with a default share image, a card-type selector, and per-post overrides for the social title, description and image.

The logic: the link preview a page gets when shared drives click-through from social and messaging apps. Controlling the exact image and copy — rather than letting each platform guess — is what turns a shared link into traffic.

09 Intelligent XML sitemaps Free

Sitemap index, per type & taxonomy

A sitemap index plus per-post-type and per-taxonomy sitemaps, regenerated automatically and served virtually at /sitemap.xml. Anything marked noindex is excluded automatically, thin content can optionally be filtered out, and a health panel shows exactly what’s included and why.

The logic: a sitemap is a crawl-budget instruction — it should list only the URLs you actually want indexed. Auto-excluding noindex and thin pages keeps crawlers focused on pages that can rank, instead of wasting budget on ones that can’t.

10 llms.txt Free

An llms.txt for AI crawlers, editable and optional

Turn on a virtual /llms.txt that describes your site to AI systems, generated from your schema identity, pages and recent posts — grouped by topic, not a flat list. View and hand-edit it in a text box, save your own version, reset to the auto-generated one, or draft it with AI. Served virtually via a rewrite rule, so it works regardless of hosting.

The logic: AI assistants increasingly read a site through an llms.txt manifest the way crawlers read robots.txt. Giving them a curated, topic-grouped map of your best content shapes how your brand is summarised — while keeping the whole thing optional and under your control.

11 Redirect manager Free

Unlimited 301/302/307/410 redirects

Create redirects with no artificial cap, with regex matching, search, and CSV import/export. Bulk-create redirects when you change a slug or restructure a section.

The logic: when a URL changes, a 301 passes the old page’s accumulated link equity to the new one — skip it and that authority is lost and visitors hit a dead end. No cap on the number matters because real site migrations produce hundreds of them at once.

12 404 monitor Free

Log 404s, fix them in one click

Logs the URLs where visitors and search engines hit a “not found” error, with a one-click “create redirect” action right from the log, and a daily auto-clean so the table doesn’t grow forever.

The logic: every 404 a crawler hits is wasted crawl budget and a broken path for whatever link pointed there. Catching them as they happen — and redirecting the ones that had traffic or links — recovers value that would otherwise silently leak away.

13 Local SEO Free

LocalBusiness schema, NAP scanner & geo checklist

LocalBusiness structured data, a name/address/phone (NAP) consistency scanner across your site (with an optional AI-verified pass), and a geographic co-occurrence checklist for the terms a local page should mention.

The logic: local ranking leans heavily on consistent, corroborated business facts — Google’s entity patents describe cross-checking the same fact from multiple sources. Inconsistent NAP details across your own pages undercut that corroboration before third-party citations even enter the picture.

14 WooCommerce SEO audit Free

Five-card, detect-only store audit

A colour-coded audit of common store SEO gaps: thin category pages, incomplete product schema, missing brand entities, silo conflicts, and orphaned attributes. Detect-only — it reports, it never edits your store.

The logic: category pages are usually a store’s biggest ranking opportunity and its most neglected — thin, template-only copy and missing product schema quietly cap what the whole catalogue can rank for. Surfacing those gaps in one view is the fastest path to fixing them.

15 Import, export & migration Free

Migrate from Yoast or Rank Math, back up as JSON

Import titles, descriptions, focus keywords and robots settings straight from Yoast SEO or Rank Math — including category, tag and WooCommerce product-category/tag data, not just posts. Export your settings as JSON for backup or moving between sites. The import runs in batches so it never times out on large sites, and never overwrites data you’ve already set in NexalSEO.

The logic: the biggest barrier to switching SEO plugins is losing years of hand-written meta. Migrating it — safely, without clobbering anything, and covering taxonomy archives most importers skip — removes that barrier entirely.

16 Setup wizard & translations Free

Guided first run, five languages

A first-run wizard walks through your Knowledge Graph identity, which modules to enable, and your social profiles. The full interface — including the block-editor sidebar — is translated into English, French, German, Spanish and Russian, and the semantic engine’s stop-word filtering and question detection follow the site’s language.

The logic: the Knowledge Graph identity set in the wizard is the root node every schema graph connects back to, so getting it right once, up front, makes everything downstream coherent. Localising the analysis means the topical scoring is accurate on non-English sites, not just translated labels.
Nexal SEO Pro

17 Internal-linking & semantic-authority engines Pro Coming soon

Where the free plugin scores your internal linking, Pro automates it. These five engines are in active development and previewed inside Pro today. Each is built directly on the Google patents above — internal-linking automation grounded in how search engines actually weight links, not guesswork.

Semantic Anchor Router

Never repeats the same anchor text for internal links. Reads the surrounding context and links using semantically close variations to prevent anchor over-optimisation and build a natural link graph.

Patent basis: the Reasonable Surfer model (US 8,005,643) weights a link partly by its anchor text and context. Repeating one exact-match anchor site-wide is an unnatural pattern; varied, contextual anchors distribute weight the way the model rewards.

Macro & Micro Context Connector

Guarantees each pillar page links to its sub-topics with both vertical and horizontal linking, and blocks any random link that would pull a crawler out of its main cluster.

Patent basis: under PageRank flow (US 6,285,999), links that keep a crawler inside a topic concentrate authority on that topic; links that scatter it out bleed authority away. The connector enforces the first pattern and prevents the second.

Crawl Depth Minimizer

Keeps every article — new or old — within three clicks of the homepage, easing crawling and speeding up indexation.

Patent basis: pages closer to well-linked hubs receive more link equity and are crawled sooner (PageRank, US 6,285,999). Minimising click-depth is a direct, measurable lever on both.

Automated Entity Infeeder

Reads the schema and entities inside an article and, based on entity strength, auto-links to the articles that complete the same topic — strengthening site-wide topical relevance.

Patent basis: Google’s entity and Knowledge-Graph patents describe understanding a document by the entities it contains and how they relate. Linking articles that share and complete an entity set makes those relationships explicit across your whole site.

Bulk Cluster Migrator

Re-links an entire site’s internal structure in a few clicks: pick the pillar pages and the engine reorganises the rest of your articles around them, pruning stale random links along the way.

Patent basis: the same link-equity and Reasonable-Surfer principles applied at scale. Legacy sites accumulate hundreds of ad-hoc links that leak authority; rebuilding the graph around real pillars is impractical by hand and exactly what this automates.

18 Advanced Local & WooCommerce Pro Coming soon

Pro Local SEO

Hyper-local semantic suggestions, Wikidata graph entity mapping, multi-location schema siloing, and Google Business Profile review-sentiment keyword mining — previewed in the Local SEO tab.

The logic: mapping your business to a Wikidata entity and siloing multiple locations cleanly gives search engines an authoritative, disambiguated identity to corroborate against — the entity-corroboration principle behind local ranking, taken beyond a single LocalBusiness block.

Pro WooCommerce

AI bulk category-content generation and advanced product-variant / merchant-graph schema — previewed in the WooCommerce tab.

The logic: thin category copy is the single biggest drag on a catalogue’s rankings; generating real, differentiated copy in bulk and modelling variants correctly in the merchant graph closes both gaps at store scale.
Start with the free plugin

Everything in the Free sections above installs on unlimited sites with no time limit. See the Free vs Pro breakdown, follow the getting started guide, or review the changelog for what’s shipped recently.

Download NexalSEO free