WordPress SEO: Tweaking SEO for WordPress Part 1: All-in-One-SEO Plugin for WordPress

This is Part 1 of 3 in the Tweaking SEO for WordPress Series

For those who are new to the whole SEO thing, it basically means Search Engine Optimization. The main aim is to making it easier for search engines to find your site and ranking your site higher in search results. There is a lot of debate on SEO best practices. Naturally, different ‘experts’ have varying thoughts and you may find some of them conflicting each other. Now unless you are a web designer, programmer or SEO is your day job, the average blogger just wants the tips straight-up with no debates. I am one such average blogger.

Sure, I will appreciate any advice but to get started but I want something point n’ shoot to start with. I can always tweak n’ play later on once I have things setup. So if you are expecting some SEO gibberish here, wrong post dude. I do not claim to be an SEO expert. If you are looking for a 10 minute setup, this might just be it.

For most folks on on self-hosted WordPress, the All-in-One-SEO plugin is probably already installed on your blog. If you have not done so, go get it. Yes, there are alternatives  like the Platinum SEO Pack plugin. Personally, I have never tried it since All-in-One-SEO has worked for me but gut tells me that both should do the job just as well. Recently, a PRO version of the AiO-SEO plugin was made available. I am not sure what extras it provides you but initial reviews show that it functioned just like the free version except you now pay a subscription. So, the free version works fine unless you having too much money, I could use a beer myself.

All in One SEO: User Integration – Easy (3 mins, longer for tweaks)

Install the plugin like you would to any WordPress plugin. You could perform an FTP upload and then unzip the contents of the plugin into your /wp-content/plugins folder, or simply:

1. Login to your WordPress blog
2. Click on Add New under the Plugins section on your left menu pane
3. Search the terms ‘All in One SEO‘
4. Click on Install followed by Activate and you are good to go.

Seriously, just do it from your WordPress Dashboard.

Once all that is done, Go to > Settings > All in One SEO and you will see a bunch settings. If you know what you are doing, go ahead and make any tweaks on your own. Else, below are some simple steps you can use.

1. Plugin Status: For the noobs like me, common sense tells us we need to select ‘Enabled‘ for the Plugin Status.
2. Home Title: This is where you enter your blog name. You could include your short blog description and key phrases if you like. The information here is read by both search engine bots and humans. The first 60 characters of whatever you put here will appear on search engine results so do enter something meaningful. To the human visitor, it gives them a quick overview of what your blog is about.
3. Home Description: Again, enter something meaningful here and not just a whole bunch of keywords. Using a brief introduction similar to your ‘About Me’ content on your blog should be best. Since it is good to be consistent, you can use the same information when you register your blog on different sites to ensure consistency. To make sure the text will fit into all ‘site decriptions’, I suggest you keep the text to 140 characters or less.
4. Home Keywords: To each his own here. Some folks research keywords like crazy. Me, I just find the most relevant keywords based on my blog topics without giving it too much thought. Though keywords are great, it is content that will continue to drive traffic to your blog. If you have no clue what to put in here, a good place to start figuring out your keywords are from your blog categories and tags. You do not want to appear as a SPAM blog to search engine bots so limit your keywords to a maximum of 10, separating each keyword or key phrase with a comma ‘,’.
5. Check Boxes: Different SEO experts will tell you different things here. For me, I ‘checked’ all the boxes. nimopress.com was registered on 09 Dec 2009. As of this post, my current Alexa Ranking is 468,652 and rising up from 21,900,000+ and a current Google Page Rank of 3. So my guess is it is working to some extend.
6. Additional Home Headers: Here, you can enter custom META TAGS. There is much debate about the relevance of META TAGS and if search engines even bother with them today. You could probably just leave this section blank. By default, search engines bots will INDEX and FOLLOW your blog. If you are like me and just want to be sure, I entered META TAGS for ROBOTS and CONTENT.

I attached some screenshots below for a visual representation of the above tweaks. Installing, activating and entering basic information should not take you more than 3 minutes. It is the tweaking and researching of keywords that might take more time. You could just leave as it is with basic information for now. In 3 months, have your researched keywords and descriptions ready and tweak your information further. Check and see if your tweaks have made any improvements to your SEO efforts in 6 months. That way, you should have a pretty good idea if your tweaks have made any improvements.

As always, if anyone would like to add to this or share your thoughts, I would very much like to hear them too. Meanwhile, have fun at this. I will touch on Part 2 using DomainTools soon.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 12th, 2010 at 11:50 and is filed under SEO and tagged with aio, day job, free version, ftp upload, gibberish, initial reviews, plugins section, search engine optimization, search engines, web designer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.