WordPress Plugin – All in One SEO Pack

An essential plugin for SEO and WordPress is the All in One SEO Pack .   This tutorial will explain what it does and show you how to use this plugin on your WordPress site . 

The All in One SEO pack plugin generates meta data automatically and allows you to customize it as you see fit.  The meta data of your page or post includes the title tag, the description tag and the keywords tag.  Having unique page-specific meta data is very important from a search engine optimization perspective. 

1. The title tag:

Title tags affect the text that appears at the very top of your browser window.  Each page should have it’s own original compelling title that describes the page content using the main keywords for the page.   Title tags ideally should be up to 64 characters in length but can be up to 95 characters before being truncated.  Your title tag should also be limited to the use of alphanumeric characters, pipes, hyphens and commas.

2. The description tag:

Description tags are used on a SERP to describe the web page’s content and persuade search engine users to visit your web site. Descriptions should be between 25 and 35 words in length. The home page description is probably your most important description so make sure that it is well written, keyword-rich and describes your site well.  Here Google has bolded the terms that were used in the search “web design Etobicoke”.

3. The keywords tag:

Keywords placed in a keyword meta tag must appear in the page copy on the actual page.  Unlike the title and description tag the keywords added here do not show anywhere on the front-end of your site or on a SERP.  In the past the keyword meta tag was considered important but Search Engines no longer give weight to the keyword meta tag.  It doesn’t hurt to use it, but don’t put a lot of effort into adding keywords to these fields.

Using the All in One SEO Plugin:

WordPress already goes a long way toward creating an SEO friendly website, adding this powerful plugin will give you more control.  Once you have installed and activated the plugin in the wp-admin you will need to configure the plugin.  In the left column of your wp-admin under settings there will now be an item called  All in One SEO.  The only thing you have to do is enable the plugin.  For beginners, you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box.  

That said, for those who want to adjust the meta data this plugin is wonderful.  The information you set on this settings page for home title, home description and home keywords will affect the first page of your WordPress installation.  The rest of the settings on this page tell this brilliant plugin how to automatically generate title tags from titles used for your categories, posts and pages. The keyword meta tag can be automatically generated from your post tags.  If you wish to you can also adjust the meta data for each individual page/post on the edit page or edit post page of the wp-admin.  This screenshot shows the All-in-One Editor from a page.

• These first three adjust the meta tags Title, Description, Keywords and should be self explanatory, if not then read the top of this post again.
• Title Attribute – this is the text that shows when you roll over the menu label in the navigation of many WordPress themes.  This is a great way to provide descriptive, keyword-rich text that describes the page for site visitors and search engines.
• Menu Label – this is really useful to fine tune Page Navigational Links!  Use this if you want your menu item to say Home but the page title (hopefully an h1 tag) to have a different keyword-rich name.
• Disable on this page/post– this is useful for pages used within a WordPress theme that isn’t actually a page –  for example if you are calling the page News as an easily editable item in your sidebar and excluding it from the menu.  If you want search engines to find a page/post then don’t tick this box.

NOTE: I’ve often found that clients are trying to adjusting these settings for their home page and they are wondering why the title tag isn’t changing; you have to go to the settings page to make adjustments for the first page of your WordPress installation. 

Please add any questions or related comments.