Welcome to the first post in a series which will provide a complete strategy and step by step for optimizing your WordPress blog to the hilt. This series of post will include plugins, theme optimizations, SEO, and more to maximize the optimization of your WordPress blog.
All-In-One SEO Pack Plugin
The first optimization step we’ll talk about is optimizing your WordPress SEO with an awesome WordPress plugin called the All-In-One SEO Pack.
This plugin is an important part of SEO. This plugin sets up your blog’s title tags and metatags to include keywords and descriptions. Different title tags place keywords in the title tags and custom meta tags for each blog post, creating more unique content for search engines.
For example, you can provide a title for your post that will be displayed on your blog. You can then provide a separate title that the search engines pick up, which allows you to pack your titles with keywords for maximum SEO and still provide nice tantalizing titles that are displayed to your blog’s readers.
Below is a list of how we recommend you optimize the settings for the All-In-One SEO pack. To find the settings after you install and activate the plugin, you should navigate to the settings tab and click the “All-In-One SEO Pack” link.
Recommended All-In-One SEO Pack Settings
Plugin Status – This should be “enabled” so the plugin works.
Home Title – This will be the title of your homepage. This is independent of any other option. If not set, the default blog title will get used. You can use whatever you like here, but if you’re targeting a specific keyword, you should definitely have it somewhere in your title.
Home Description – The same principles for your title applie here, except that you’ll be able to include a few more keywords for SEO.
Home Keywords – You should place keywords here that best explain your blog, and would be most likely searched for when finding your site. I suggest that you do a bit of research and find keywords for your site using a keyword research tool. One of the best ones happens to be free and is provided by Google here.
Cononical URL’s - This option should be checked and enabled. If you want to learn more about this option, then check out this Google Webmasters post on cononical URL’s.
Rewrite Titles – Checked and enabled. This is what you see in your browser’s window title bar. This is NOT visible on a page, only in the window title bar and of course in the source. If set, all page, post, category, search and archive page titles get rewritten. You can specify the format for most of them.
Note: The following options are completely up to you and debatable in terms of SEO, but I will provide with the settings that we currently (at the time of this writing) use on this site.
Post Title Format – %post_title% | %blog_title%
Page Title Format – %page_title% | %blog_title%
Category Title Format – %category_title% | %blog_title%
Archive Title Format – %date% | %blog_title%
Tag Title Format - %tag% | %blog_title%
Search Title Format – %search% | %blog_title%
Description Format – %description%
404 Title Format - Nothing found for %request_words%
Paged Format – Part %page%
Use Categories for Meta – Unchecked and disabled.
Dynamically Generate Keywords for Posts - Checked and Enabled. Checking this generates keywords on a custom posts page (set it in options->reading) to be dynamically generated from the keywords of the posts showing on that page. If unchecked, it will use the keywords set in the edit page screen for the posts page. This will help your SEO.
Note: The following settings are highly debatable and not entirely a “set in stone” recommendation. Prefacing, Andy Beard has done a lot of research on maximizing your WordPress SEO, and provides tons of great information on different possibilities. If you want to fully understand this, I highly recommend you check out his blog.
Use Noindex for Categories – Checked and enabled. Check this for excluding category pages from being crawled. Useful for avoiding duplicate content. The issue of duplicate content or even of it’s existence is a hot debate. Whether it’s real or made up idea to deter webmasters from stealing content, I believe this is the best route to take – better safe than sorry.
Use Noindex for Archives - Checked and enabled. The same principles above apply here.
Use No Index for Tag Archives - Unchecked and disabled. This allows Google and other search engines to find and crawl your tag pages. I believe this is an excellent opportunity to drive tons of traffic to your blog by having your tag pages indexed. I’ve extensively researched the optimal use of categories and tags on blogs. A full strategy for this will be a future post in this “WordPress Blog Optimization” series.
Autogenerate Descriptions - Checked and enabled. Check this and your META descriptions will get autogenerated if there’s no excerpt. Of course, the best practice is to provide a descriSption for the post with keywords you are targeting for maximum SEO-age.
Capitalize Category Titles - Checked and enabled.
Additional Post Headers - Leave blank, you probably don’t need it – and if you don’t know what it’s for, you definitely don’t need it.
Additional Page Headers - Leave blank, same as above.
Additional Home Headers - Leave blank, same as above.
Log Important Events - Unchecked and disabled. This is not necessary either.
Of course once you’ve completed entering your options you must click the “update options” button at the bottom for them to take effect.
Thanks for checking out this post. Leave your comments, suggestions and even recommendations below – I’d love to hear them. Stick around and subsribe to the feed to stay on top of all of the posts released in this awesome WordPress Optimization series.
Similar Posts:
- 5 Surefire Ways to Get Indexed in Google in Less than 24 Hours
- How To Get Easy Ad Revenue Like a Professional
- Get More Blog Readers – Killer Strategy to Put Your Blog Promotion on Steroids
- Web 2.0 Linking Strategies: 4 Ways to Get Free Backlinks
- Auto Social Poster
Promoted Profits has reviewed thousands of systems for making money online.
Out of all the different methods available one plan stands above as the best and most complete method. Presenting Consumer Wealth by Daniel Turner & Marc LindsayCLICK HERE FOR THE BEST MONEY GETTING SYSTEM
read more...DISCLOSURE: We are a professional blog site that receives compensation from the companies whose products we link to, evaluate, or review. We are independently owned and the opinions expressed are our own.
NOTE: We believe in supporting good companies, people, and products. If you have any experiences that are not in line with our values please do not hesitate to let us know so we can investigate further.
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
Great stuff, will stay tuned via your rss feed.. btw do you have Twitter, can I join you? Thanks!
Hi Bryan, Thank you for the excellent explanation. What is the link to Andy Beard\’s site, or some of the content you were talking about reading? Maybe you should add it to the blog post for your readers? Davies
People who are not using an seo company and have a blog need to have this seo plug in
I hit a link in google and read
a blog on this site about the economic
strain we are taking in SA. I tried to
find it once I registered, unfortunately
to no avail. Perhaps somebody could be
so kind as to show me the way? Anyway,
I’m here and waiting!
————–
Rockstarbabu
—————-
Hi seo jaipur,
I’m not quite sure what you’re talking about. Was it a post on this blog that has been removed? Anyway, even if I can’t help thanks for taking part and hang around because there’s lots more good stuff to come (lots!).
Cheers,
Bryan
Hi Minna,
Sorry for the delay in answer. But if you want to follow on Twitter you can find me here: http://twitter.com/theprofitbryan – plus, I have some special things I only post on Twitter so maybe I’ll see you over there!
Bryan
I have been using the All in one SEO plugin from day one. Recently I shifted to thesis and it has
inbuilt capabilities, but again some how my instincts dont allow me to remove all in one seo
or migrate all in one seo settings to thesis. Kinda scared to do so…
All in One SEO is a great plugin. If it were not for the awesome plugin, I wouldn’t be receiving such high amount of traffic from search engines.
Hi Bryan, Thank you for the excellent explanation. All in One SEO is a great plugin. very useful for the people who is not joined with any SEO company.
Thanks for this great guide. All-In-One Seo is definitely a great plugin. I have heard that you should leave the “Canonical” box unchecked because this plugin doesn’t handle it very well.
Also, on one of my blogs I am experimenting with having the category pages be indexed and the tag archives be noindexed. This is because I want to optimize my category pages for SEO and want to see if I can get them ranked for important keywords related to the niche.