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all in one seo pack

I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately around the all in one seo pack and how I use it here at SEO Lair.  The all in one seo pack is a great all around plugin for WordPress that enables you to manage core on-site optimization areas on your site.  In this tutorial you will find out exactly which fields provide the most seo beneift as well as the optimal settings for each.  First and foremost, the all in one seo pack for WordPress can be found here.  After the all in one seo pack is installed, the first field that appears in the enable/disable field.  I think this one  is a no brainer.  Next are your title, keyword, and description tags for the home page of your site.  The title and description tags are going to be the focus here. Make sure to include keywords you want to optimize your site for in both your title and description tags.  Google doesn’t use the keyword tag in their algorithm, however other engines such as Yahoo and most of the smaller indexes still do.  Fill this in with some basic keywords, but don’t spend more than 5-10 seconds, as there are other areas of the plugin that will provide a greater seo benefit.

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The next field in the all in one seo pack is the canonical URL field.  This is arguably the most important field in the all in one seo pack outside of maybe the title tag on your home page.  You WANT to check this.  For those who are unfamiliar with the “canonical URL”- it makes sure there is one location of a web page by redirecting non www urls to those that include the www.  This one location, usually with the www, is known as the “canonical URL”.  This is important to your SEO for two reasons.  First when people link to your site, regardless of which version of the URL they link to, link juice will always be passed to the proper page.  Secondly having one canonical URL will cut down on some minor duplicate content issues, especially in some of the not so modern indexes.

The rest of the fields in the above picture all have to do with templated tags which auto-populate for different pages.  To make sure these tags are actually being populated, make sure the “rewrite titles” field is checked.  The most important of these fields is the post title field.  Wordpress is set up in such a way that usually the post pages are the strongest.  Notice how I have the post title as the first part of the title tag, but then I add in the category as well.  This adds additional SEO benefit especially if your categories have keywords in them.  For the rest of the fields in the above picture, its safe to leave them as the default.  You can of course change them based on your preferences.  I see some people make custom 404 error pages, but if you set your site up correctly, users should never be hitting a 404 page unless they manually type in yoursite.com/blah, for example.  One thing I do in these fields is add my brand name to the end..  This is a personal preference because I want my brand to be visible.  This is absolutely not necessary for SEO.  If you are having a hard time ranking for your brand term, or your brand term is a common term such as “SEO guru” you should include your brand at the end of every field.  This will strengthen the association of that term with YOUR site as opposed to someone elses.

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Above are the rest of the options in the all in one seo pack.  The first three fields have to do with auto-generating the keywords tag.  As mentioned above, the keyword tag isn’t nearly as effective as it once was, making this a part of your site you definitely want to automate.  The all in one seo pack give you the option to include categories as your keywords, tags for your keywords, or both.  As you can see above, I use the tags to auto-populate my keyword tags.  There is no harm in using your categories as well, especially if you have a lot of them. The field to use your tags is important and should always be checked.  The third field is your on/off switch for auto-generating keyword meta tags on your post pages.  This should also be checked.

The next three fields give you the option to no index certain types of pages on your site.  For example if you don’t want search engine and other crawlers seeing your archives, check the”use no index for archive pages” field.  Some SEO’s I’ve seen choose to no index their tags or archive pages.  In my mind the URLs on your site on your assets.  Having more pages indexed on your site gives two benefits: it increases the power of internal links and it enables you to rank for a broader range of terms.  There are reason for no indexing certain pages on your site, but those are advanced seo tactics outside the scope of this post.

The remaining fields in the all in one seo pack include auto-generating descriptions and capitalizing categories.  I choose to write my own descriptions, however you can choose to auto-populate them if you wish.  If you choose to auto-populate them, it will pull in content from your page and place it in the description tag.  It is best to write your own desciptions for each page that include the keyword(s) you are trying to rank the page for.  Also keep in mind that you can include call to action in your description tags which can increase the chances of your listing getting clicked on in the SERPS.  Capitalizing category titles is simply a styling issue.  I choose to do so as I think it looks more professional.  There is no seo impact here either way. The remaining four fields in the all in one seo pack I do not use.

I hope you enjoyed my post on how to use all in one seo pack for WordPress.  If you have any additional questions please ask them in one of the following three ways: post a comment below, send me a direct message on twitter, or  email me at webmaster at SEOLair dot com!

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