HeyTC SEO

Lean, no-bloat structured-data SEO for WordPress. It does the few things that actually move the needle for content publishers — rich structured data, a Google News sitemap, instant indexing, and clean meta/social tags — and deliberately nothing else.

Built for speed (and for news/editorial sites), but generic enough for any blog. No upsell dashboards, no tracking, no third-party runtime dependencies — no bloat.

Features

• Structured data (JSON-LD) — Article / NewsArticle, Organization, WebSite, BreadcrumbList, and FAQPage, with E-E-A-T author signals (job title, areas of expertise, education, last-reviewed date).
• Entity Links — map named entities to authoritative URLs; when an entity is mentioned in a post it's linked in the Article schema (about / mentions).
• Google News sitemap at /news-sitemap.xml, cached and bounded.
• IndexNow — instant indexing ping on publish (Bing, Yandex, Seznam).
• Meta & social — titles, meta descriptions, canonical, Open Graph, Twitter Cards, robots, and per-post noindex / nofollow.
• Structured FAQ markup — from a per-post FAQ editor and auto-detected from core/details (accordion) blocks. (Note: Google retired FAQ rich results in May 2026; this remains valid, machine-readable FAQPage schema and the FAQs render visibly on the page — it's structure, not a rich-result promise.)
• Security hardening — REST/XML-RPC tightening, security headers, version string removal, author-enumeration block.
• Core Web Vitals helpers — deferred scripts and configurable resource hints.
• Plays nice with others — detects Yoast, Rank Math, All in One SEO, SEOPress, and The SEO Framework, and automatically suppresses its own overlapping output so you never get duplicate tags or schema.

Why HeyTC SEO?

• Tiny by design. ~3,000 lines, no shipped dependencies. It does its work on wp_head / wp_footer and gets out of the way — your pages and server stay fast.
• Correct, not noisy. Schema follows Google's current rules (e.g. author name separate from job title). It's about eligibility and machine-readability — not a promise of AI-ranking magic.
• Coexists. Detects the big SEO plugins and steps aside, so you can trial it without duplicate tags or schema graphs.
• Developer-first. Everything site-specific is a filter (see below) — no sprawling settings screens to wade through.

What it deliberately doesn't do

Staying lean means saying no. This plugin does not ship redirects / 404 monitoring, social-image generation, or a general post/page XML sitemap — WordPress core already provides one. If you want an all-in-one SEO suite, use one. HeyTC SEO is the opposite bet.

Requirements

• WordPress 6.6+ (tested up to 7.0)
• PHP 8.2+

Installation

1. Download or clone this repository into wp-content/plugins/heytc-seo.
2. Activate HeyTC SEO in Plugins.
3. Configure under the HeyTC SEO menu.

The folder is heytc-seo, the main file heytc-seo.php.

Entity Links

Under HeyTC SEO → Entity Links, add one entity per line:

Patrick Mahomes | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Mahomes
NASA | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA
Acme Corp | https://acme.example.com/about

When an entity's exact name appears in a post's tags or body, it's emitted in that post's Article schema as about (primary) and mentions (the rest), each with a sameAs link. Matching is case-insensitive but preserves your canonical name.

Coexistence with other SEO plugins

If another major SEO plugin is active, HeyTC SEO automatically disables its own meta tags and structured data (canonical, robots, descriptions, Open Graph, Twitter, and all JSON-LD) to avoid duplicates. The news sitemap, security hardening, and IndexNow keep working. An admin notice tells you when this is in effect. Override detection with the heytc_seo_conflicting_plugin filter.

Developer filters

Everything site-specific is a filter with an empty/sensible default — nothing brand-specific is emitted out of the box.

Examples

// Set your X/Twitter handle and org profiles.
add_filter( 'heytc_seo_twitter_handle', fn() => 'yoursite' );
add_filter( 'heytc_seo_organization_same_as', fn() => [
    'https://x.com/yoursite',
    'https://www.linkedin.com/company/yoursite',
] );

// Point a category breadcrumb at a content hub instead of the bare archive.
add_filter( 'heytc_seo_category_breadcrumb_map', function ( $map ) {
    $map['reviews'] = [ 'name' => 'Product Reviews', 'url' => home_url( '/reviews/' ) ];
    return $map;
} );

External services

This plugin contacts external services only when you enable IndexNow:

• IndexNow (api.indexnow.org) — on publish, submits the post URL for instant indexing. Off by default. See https://www.indexnow.org/.

No other outbound requests are made.

Theme integrations

includes/integrations/ holds optional, auto-detected integrations that stay inert unless their target is active. Bundled:

• Newspaper (tagDiv) — suppresses the theme's own breadcrumb schema (so it doesn't duplicate this plugin's) and tunes the speakable selector.

PRs adding integrations for other popular themes are welcome.

License

GPL-2.0-or-later. See LICENSE.