WordPress Plugins in Use – All in One SEO Pack

pluginEven though WordPress out-of-the-box does a great job at optimizing any blog for SEO (Search Engine Optimization), there are a number of plugins that can help tweak and squeeze every last ounce of SEO help you can find. The one that we use, and seems to be one of the most well-rounded is All in One SEO Pack.

What does Google have to say about WordPress and SEO?

Probably the best source of information about what Google thinks of WordPress and how it indexes a WordPress blog is this 45 minute video presentation given by Matt Cutts of Google. In a nutshell, Matt explains that WordPress is already optimized for SEO and how Google indexes content. But that does not mean you cannot make it better and focus the search engines in the direction you desire for maximum exposure to the keywords you need.

Installation

  1. In the plugins section of the dashboard, go to “Add New” and search for “All in one SEO pack”. Use the auto installer.
  2. Activate the plugin.
  3. You can configure the various options under the “Settings” menu in the dashboard.

Configuration

There are many options you can configure and adjust with regards to SEO in this module. Here is a screenshot of the settings page:

Click to see full screen image

Click to see full screen image

  • The “Home” textboxes at the top control a customized title tag, and meta keywords and description.
    Tip: Make sure the keywords your blog focuses on are in the beginning of your title. Your blog’s name/website can be put at the end, but most people do not search for your blog name, they search for keywords they are interested in.
  • All the “Format” textboxes are important for setting a title for various pages. The most important is the “Post Title Format” which controls the title of every blog post.
    Tip: I would highly recommend having it be: %post_title%
    There is no need to repeat your blog’s name in each post title, as it clutters your SEO efforts for post titles that include important keywords people will use in their searches.
  • There are a few checkboxes at the bottom that are quite important:
    All the “noindex” checkboxes: Make sure these are all checked. This will help guide the search engines to only index your post content and page content. They will not index duplicate content on archive and category pages.

Permalinks (Pretty URLs)

In combination with this plugin, I’d highly recommend enabling permalinks in your blog. To do this, go to: Settings -> Permalinks in the left hand dashboard menu. For this blog, we chose:

Month and name https://www.lexiconn.com/blog/2009/10/sample-post/

What this does is instead of a dynamic (ugly) URL of:
https://www.lexiconn.com/blog/?p=64

You now get a pretty URL that has your post title keywords in the URL itself, which helps with SEO and makes it easier for all search engines to index your content effectively.

Please share other tips and ideas for plugins as they relate to SEO for WordPress.

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4 Comments

  1. Florida SEO says:

    I would like to recommend the Platinum SEO Pack, it has more useful options than the all in one seo pack. There are more nofollow selections, additional post, page and home headers, you can nofollow all of the outgoing links on just the front page, you can add the noydir meta tag, the noodp meta tag, you can use the option for noindex on sub pages and my favorite option of all is all of the options that it gives you on each individual post and page of your wordpress blog.

    Those are just a few of the things that I can think of off the top of my head. The fact of the matter is that I have used both and have found that I am in greater control of my websites on-page seo than when I was using the All in One SEO Pack.

  2. Nice quick run-thru on the All in One pack. Just ran the install, config page looked a bit scary but otherwise already seeing the end results which is nice. Thanks also for the video link with Matt Cutts – interesting but nice to see someone from Google’s spam department with a bit of humor :-) Thanks again for the post Rob!

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