Search Atlas Help Center

📘 Search Atlas SEO WordPress Plugin — Version 2.6.1

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Camilo Aponte

Camilo Aponte

Last updated on Sep 30, 2026

The Search Atlas SEO plugin is the official WordPress integration for the Search Atlas platform — connecting your site to OTTO AI automation, Content Genius publishing, and a full suite of native SEO tools for metadata, schema, redirects, and media optimization.

⚙️ Requirements: PHP 8.2+ · WordPress 5.2+

🆕 What's New in 2.6.1

Version 2.6.1 ships two headline additions on top of the 2.5.x foundation:

Feature

What it does

Media Optimization

Convert images to WebP/AVIF, enable native lazy loading, and auto-inject image dimensions — all from inside WordPress

Bing Instant Indexing (IndexNow)

Submit URLs to Bing automatically on publish using the IndexNow protocol

Beaver Builder Sitemap Exclusion

Beaver Builder template post types are automatically excluded from Search Atlas–generated sitemaps, matching legacy Rank Math behavior

🧩 Full Feature Overview

🔌 Connecting the Plugin

To connect the plugin to your Search Atlas account, you need two separate credentials:

  • SearchAtlas API Key — a 32-character code found in the Search Atlas dashboard under Settings → API Keys. This authenticates the plugin to your overall Search Atlas account.
  • Project-specific Key — a separate key tied to the individual Search Atlas project you want this WordPress site to sync with. Find it on the project's settings page in the Search Atlas dashboard.

Seeing an "API key could not be verified" error? This almost always means one of the two credentials is missing, swapped, or pasted from the wrong project. Confirm you've entered the 32-character SearchAtlas API Key in the API Key field and the project-specific key in the project field — not the same value in both.

Once both keys are saved correctly, the plugin displays a successful connection status in your WordPress dashboard.

⚙️ OTTO — OTTO SEO Automation Engine

OTTO is Search Atlas's server-side SEO engine. When OTTO Pixel is installed on your site, OTTO reads every page's SEO state, generates AI-optimized suggestions, and deploys fixes without touching your theme or database content.

What OTTO manages through the plugin:

  • Title tags, meta descriptions, H1/H2/H3 — AI-generated and deployed per page
  • Open Graph and Twitter Card tags — for social media previews
  • Image alt text (media library) — generated and applied in bulk
  • NLP terms and missing keywords (page content) — semantic terms injected into the page body to improve topical relevance. Note: Bulk NLP term deployment may require multiple attempts in the current release. A fix is in progress.
  • FAQ schema — structured content blocks for rich snippets
  • Schema markup (JSON-LD) — Article, FAQ, Product, BreadcrumbList, LocalBusiness, and more
  • Canonical tags and html lang attributes
  • Internal link suggestions — strategic interlinking recommendations

OTTO deployment modes:

  • OTTO Pixel — lightweight JavaScript snippet that applies fixes client-side (invisible to visitors, readable by search engines)
  • Cloudflare Worker — alternative deployment for sites using Cloudflare
  • OTTO Persistence — optionally writes OTTO's suggestions directly to native WordPress post meta fields (title, description, custom fields) for permanent storage

OTTO Frontend Toolbar: Logged-in admins and editors see a per-page toggle in the WordPress frontend toolbar to enable or disable OTTO on specific pages without touching any settings panel.

To remove a deployed fix: In your OTTO project, find the fix in the Deployed list and click Undeploy. Changes are removed from the front end immediately.

⚠️ Known issue: Atlas Brain may show WordPress plugin authentication as Pending even after the plugin shows a successful connection. This is a display sync issue under active fix; your deployment capabilities are not affected.

⚠️ Compatibility: OTTO is fully compatible with Yoast SEO, Rank Math, WP Rocket, Kinsta, and most major page builders. On Elementor sites, title tag and meta description updates deploy normally, but H1 tag updates must be made manually within Elementor.

✍️ Meta Tag Management

The SEO sidebar and bulk editor give you full control over on-page metadata across every post, page, and custom post type.

Per-post controls (Gutenbergsidebar):

  • SEO title and meta description with live character counter
  • Focus keyword
  • Canonical URL
  • Robots directives: noindex, nofollow, noarchive, noimageindex, nosnippet
  • Open Graph: title, description, image, URL, type
  • Twitter Card metadata

Bulk editing:

  • Update meta titles and descriptions across hundreds of pages at once using AI-generated suggestions from Search Atlas
  • Primary Category Selector — when a post belongs to multiple categories, designate a primary category to control the breadcrumb path, canonical URL structure (when using /%category%/ permalinks), and sitemap URLs

🧱 Schema Markup

A dedicated schema engine generates and injects JSON-LD structured data without touching your theme files.

Supported schema types:

  • Article / BlogPosting
  • FAQPage
  • Product
  • BreadcrumbList
  • LocalBusiness
  • HowTo
  • VideoObject
  • Custom types via the schema editor

How it works:

  • Override schema per post via the Gutenberg meta box
  • The plugin automatically deduplicates schema tags to prevent conflicts with other plugins, including Rank Math and Yoast
  • Validates JSON-LD output and reports errors before you publish

🔗 Redirect Manager

A full redirect management system built into WordPress — no separate plugin needed.

Supported redirect types: 301, 302, 307, 308

Pattern matching options:

  • Exact URL match
  • Contains (substring)
  • Starts with
  • Ends with
  • Regular expression (regex)

Additional features:

  • Hit count tracking and last-accessed timestamps per redirect
  • Import redirects from Yoast SEO, Rank Math, or the Redirection plugin in one click
  • Create redirects directly from 404 error logs
  • Active/inactive toggle — disable rules without deleting them

🛑 404 Error Monitor

The 404 Monitor automatically logs every broken URL request your site receives.

  • Tracks hit counts and user agents per broken URL
  • Sortable admin table with the most frequent errors at the top
  • One-click redirect creation — turn any 404 into a redirect without leaving the monitor screen
  • Useful for identifying broken backlinks, old content, or crawl errors discovered by Google

🤖 Robots.txt & XML Sitemap

Robots.txt editor:

  • Edit your robots.txt virtually — works even if no physical file exists on the server
  • Add, remove, and validate crawl rules
  • Manage sitemap references
  • Automatic backup before any change

XML Sitemap generator:

  • Automatically generates sitemaps for all post types and taxonomies
  • Splits into multiple files (up to 5,000 URLs per file) with a sitemap index
  • Updates automatically when content is published or modified
  • Exclude specific URLs from the sitemap
  • Fully compatible with Google Search Console submission

Submit your sitemap index URL directly to Google Search Console after the plugin generates it.

🖼️ Media Optimization (New in 2.6.x)

A performance module that improves Core Web Vitals scores directly from your WordPress admin.

Image Format Conversion:

  • Convert existing images to WebP or AVIF
  • Enable native lazy loading on images
  • Auto-inject image dimensions

🎯 You now have a complete overview of what the Search Atlas SEO plugin version 2.6.1 can do. Install or update the plugin from your WordPress admin, enter your Search Atlas API Key and OTTO Pixel UUID under Search Atlas → Settings, and start deploying OTTO fixes to your live pages.