All In One SEO Plugin

Most “how-to” Wordpress SEO articles tell you the basics of what you need to do to improve your search engine ranking. Tweak this, remove that, download this plugin…and usually the plugin they say to install is the All-in-One SEO plugin. While it’s true, this plugin is great, it can be very confusing to someone new to blogging, Wordpress and SEO. To make things easier, I’m going to try to guide you through the proper set up for this plugin.

Installation

Installation of the plugin is very easy. Simply go to “Plugins” (over there on the left) and click on “Add New Plugin.” In the search box, type in “all in one seo” and click search. The first item on the lift shound be “All in One SEO Pack.” Click “Install” and a little preview window will pop up. Click “Install” again and the plugin will install. Activate and you’re done!

Setup

Under “Settings,” you should now see an option for the plugin. This is where many people start to get confused. There are quite a few options listed, and no real instructions. We’ll take them one by one.

#1 Enable/Disable – This is pretty self-explanatory. Just make sure that you have enabled the plugin before you click save so that the plugin will work.

#2 Home Title -Put the page title for your home page here. If you leave this blank, it will default to the site name you defined under the General Settings of Wordpress. Most often you will want to place your blog name and maybe your tagline here.

#3 Home Description -Put a brief (no more than 160 characters) description of your site here. This is what will show as your description in the search engines, so make it good (and brief!). Do not leave this field blank!

#4 Home Keywords -You may have read that meta keywords aren’t important for SEO anymore. This is necessarily true. They may not be as important as they once were, but they are still important. Add several relevant keywords here. Make sure to include your main keyword is at the beginning of the list.

#5 Canonical URLs -This feature helps you avoid duplicate content issues, which is a good thing. Make sure this box is checked. If you want more information on what canonical URLs are, check out this post on the Google Webmaster Blog.

#6 Rewrite Titles -When this box is checked, all page, post, category, search, and archive page titles get rewritten. You will be able to specify format in the next few boxes. Many themes have built-in good SEO title formats, but just in case your chosen theme isn’t one of these, you will want to leave this box checked. If you choose not to rewrite page titles, your blog will be using a format that generally places the post title last, which is bad for SEO.

#7 Title Formats -There are six different instances in which you need to specify how the title is shown. When you install the plugin, these six boxes are already filled in with title formats that are considered good SEO. Unless you want to experiment, I would just leave these the way they are. To maximize the benefits, make sure you include a keyword in each of your post titles (done when editing a post- not here).

#8 Use Categories for META Keywords -Unless you are very sure that you are careful and strategic about your category names, I would leave this box unchecked. You can add keywords manually for each post in the custom fields (when editing a post). Here’s why – say you forget to change the default category – uncategorized – and have this setting checked. You’ve now placed the word “uncategorized” as a meta keyword. Not good!

#9 Use Tags for META keywords – Leave this one unchecked as well, for the same reason as above. Unless you are very careful with what tags you use, you’ll just end up with a mish-mash of words that aren’t going to help you rank in the search engines.

#10 Dynamically Generate Keywords for Posts Page – For best results, I suggest you leave this box unchecked as well. You’ll have more control over what keywords the search engines pick up if you do this manually. More on how to do it manually later.

#11 Use noindex for – There are three of these noindex checkboxes. Make sure each one is checked. These options tell the search engines not to index these items within your site (categories, archives, tag archives). This also helps minimize duplicate content risks.

#12 Autogenerate Descriptions – This feature tells the plugin to automatically generate META descriptions for your posts using the first 150 characters of each post. Unless you are a king or queen of content and ALWAYS manage to place your keywords within the first 150 characters, you are better off manually entering descriptions (done when editing the post). That being said, you can have this feature checked and then still enter descriptions manually on each post page. This is nice for those times you forget to enter the description manually, or for posts that you aren’t trying to rank for.

#13 Capitalize Category Titles – I’m actually not sure of the SEO value for this option. It might just be a visual thing. Up to you whether or not you check this box.

#14 Additional Headers – You can add additional code to your page and post headers here. I personally leave these blank. They aren’t really needed for anything SEO-wise.

#15 Log important events – This is a troubleshooting option. It’s up to you whether or not you want it checked, but a log of any problems that occur can help you solve the errors.

Now that you’ve selected and entered all your options, double check that the enable button is selected and click save. You have now set the basic settings for the All-in-One SEO plugin.

Ok, great…but now you need to know how to use those custom fields that the plugin just placed at the bottom of every post and page edit screen.

Continue to part 2 – How to use the All in One SEO Pack.