You want your WordPress powered site to rank well, right? Like most site owners you have probably read dozens of blogs, and more “Top 10 SEO tips for WordPress”, or perhaps “Must Have WordPress Plugins” posts than you care to remember. The only problem is that many of these articles just say you have to install the plugins, not how to use them. I’ll admit that I am as much at fault as anyone else. Here’s the problem; while some plugins require little or no configuration, and even less on-going attention – All in one SEO pack is not one of them. Miss a check box or ignore a field and you could be doing more harm than good – your site rankings could drop faster than Wile E. Coyote holding an Acme umbrella.
This post will be updated from time-to-time when there are significant updates to the plugin. Items that are new to this post will be bolded. Additionally, I’ll mark items that could be detrimental to your rankings with a caution sign .
Updated on 12/14/2009 – The version currently being covered is 1.6.8.2.
Version 1.6.8.2 contains some unknown updates so that it will be ready for WordPress.2.9, also the developer has made a “pro” version available for purchase. As far as I can see the there are no functional differences between the two versions. The pro version is intended for use by hosting companies and consultants who do not want the donation request displayed on the configuration page of their clients.
Visit the SEO pack creator’s page for a complete change log.
All in one SEO Pack Configuration – site settings
From within your WordPress admin, go to the settings area, then select “All in one SEO”. There are a lot of options here, but don’t feel intimidated, we’ll walk through most of them.
| Plugin Status | With each new update, the developer has chosen to disable the plugin. Presumably, this forces you to review the settings each time, and hopefully avoid any surprises. You’ll need to enable it after you install and again after each update.
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| Home Title | As its name implies, this is where you provide the page title for the “home” of your web site, leave this blank and word press defaults to the site name you defined in your WordPress configuration.
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| Home Description | This box provides the Content for the meta-description tag. Leave this one blank and WordPress does not even give you a description tag. That is bad, be sure to fill this in with a proper site description.
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| Home Keywords (comma separated) |
Even though use of the meta-keywords tag has been degraded over the years, it is still an important part of an overall SEO plan. Add carefully selected keywords here. Leave this blank and WordPress does not add the meta-keywords tag to your page. For best results, place your primary keywords in the front of the list. |
| Canonical URLS | This newly added feature is enabled by default – leave it that way. If you are not familiar with canonical URLs, and would like to be – read this Google webmaster blog post. For the rest of you, just know that this feature helps avoid duplicate content issues with the major search engines. That’s a good thing.
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| Rewrite Titles | If set, all page, post, category, search and archive page titles get rewritten. You can specify the format for most of them (as shown below). For example: The default templates puts the title tag of posts like this: “Blog Category >> Blog Name >> Post Title”. That would be considered anti-SEO. With the default settings, Rewrite Title rewrites: “Post Title | Blog Name”.
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| Post Title Format (other titles too) |
Each of the six Title format boxes allow you to customize how the titles are displayed in the various parts of the site. On sites I maintain, I leave all but the Post setting alone. On each of those I insert a few VERY carefully selected keywords (or synonyms). Doing this ensures those keywords are part every title.
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| Description Format | There are a four automated formats available for the setting. The default is the best one, leave this one alone. |
| 404 Title Format | The box sets the page title for your 404 (page not found) error pages. |
| Paged Format | Leave this one alone. |
| Use Categories for META keywords |
If you are hyper-careful and strategic about your category names, go ahead and use this. If you are like the rest of us, leave this one alone and add your keywords manually for each post. |
| Use Tags for META keywords |
If you are thoughtful and strategic about your tag names, go ahead and use this as it could save you some time as you create new posts. Checking this cause the tags you set for a given post to be used as the META keywords for that post. You can also add additional as you normally would as well. Just be careful not to duplicate them. |
| Dynamically Generate Keywords for Posts Page | If you have changed the default setting of WordPress and the listing of of your posts is somewhere other than your default/home page then this option determines if you want the keywords for that page set dynamically (based on all the posts listed) or if they should be manually entered. I suggest you do it manually. |
| Use noindex for… | There are three of these boxes, ensure each one is selected. This tells the search engines to not index these areas of your site. This is another method minimizing duplicate content risks.
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| Autogenerate Descriptions |
Enabling this feature will tell SEO pack to automagically generate META descriptions for your posts using the first 150 characters of your article. If you are a content rock star and always get your keywords in the first sentence, then this will work great for you. The plugin will look first to see if you set one manually on the post before auto-generating one. Since most of us are note content rock stars, it’s generally safer to enter descriptions manually on each post.
I have this feature enabled to save me a few seconds when I occasionally post articles that I don’t care if they rank or not. It’s also a nice safety net for when I just plain forget to do it. NOTE: We’ll discuss further down how/where to enter your post and page descriptions. |
| Capitalize Category Titles | This is a bit of a mystery. Check this and page titles, of category pages with be will have the first letter of each word capitalized. Other than for visual appeal, I (and several fellow SEOs I checked with) can think of no reason to do this. Google’s Matt Cutts, shared with me “Google tends to ignore upper vs. lowercase. But certainly users respond to the differences quite a bit.” The default behavior of WordPress is to use the text you enter as the category title, as the page title as well, if you want initial caps in one, wouldn’t you want it in both? My recommendation is if you want titles like this, enter them this way and leave this unchecked to save a few processor clicks. |
| Exclude Pages | Pages listed here will not be processed by the all in one seo pack. This is usefully if you have other, non-WordPress, dynamic content running on your site. |
| Additional Headers | There are three of these boxes. Text entered here will be added to the head section of your pages. These are useful if you need to add meta validation for webmaster tools. If you use these, use with caution. These are not required for basic SEO practices. |
| Log Important Events | This is a troubleshooting tool from the developer. If checked and a significant event (No, I have no idea what that would be) happens, it’ll be logged. |
All in one SEO Pack Configuration – post settings
When creating a new post you’ll want to scroll to the bottom of your post editing page to the All in one SEO Pack section. There you will see the following four options.
| Title | You can optionally enter a page title here, if left blank SEO Pack will use the post’s title. If you are attempting to rank in a competitive market (who isn’t) entering an alternate title here allows you to make use of additional keywords or synonyms. Don’t stuff keywords here, you will regret it. Also, the closer your primary keyword is to the beginning, the better.
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| Description | This is the META-description for the post. Carefully craft these as search engines consider them in ranking and display them in results. SEO Pack shows a counter as you type letting you know how close you are to the recommended 160 character limit. Try to get strongest key word/phrase as close to the front as possible.
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| Keywords | This is the META-keywords for the post. As mentioned above, use of the keywords tag has been degraded over the years, but it is still used by some engines. Put your most important ones closer to the front. |
| Disable on this page/post |
If for some reason you wish to NOT use the SEO pack on a page, check this box. |
All in one SEO Pack Configuration – page settings
When creating a new page, be sure to update the All in one SEO pack settings, found near the bottom of the editing screen. Page settings are almost identical to the post settings, with just one additional option – menu label.
| Title | You can optionally enter a page title here, if left blank SEO Pack will use the WordPress page title. Remember, entering an alternate title here allows you to make use of additional keywords or synonyms. Don’t stuff keywords here, you will regret it. Also, the closer your primary keyword is to the beginning, the better.
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| Description | This is the META-description for the page. Carefully craft these as search engines consider them in ranking and display them in results. SEO Pack shows a counter as you type letting you know how close you are to the recommended 160 character limit. Try to get strongest key word/phrase as close to the front as possible.
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| Keywords | This is the META-keywords for the page. As mentioned above, use of the keywords tag has been degraded over the years, but it is still used by some engines. Put your most important ones closer to the front. |
| Title Attribute | Text you enter here will become the link title text for links to this page. Link titles appear when you hover over a link. The affect they have on ranking is debatable, but it’s minimal at best. This is more of a usability feature as it allows you to provide additional information about the link. Link titles can add a nice touch if used correctly. |
| Menu Label | The sets the text used in your site menus for this page, left blank it will be the same as the WordPress page title.
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| Disable on this page/post |
If for some reason you wish to NOT use the SEO pack on a page, check this box. |
What are you waiting for?
There you have it, all the info you need to configure your All In One SEO Pack and get your page rankings climbing. This plugin makes it easy for anyone to optimize their WordPress blog posts and pages for better search engine placement.
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Friday, 7. August 2009
Jack this is a good post on the All in One SEO plug-in. Definitely a must have plug-in.
You mention in the beginning of your post there were a few things where this plug in could hurt your rankings. In reading the post I see you have some wisdom about stuffing keywords into titles and such. Are there any BIGGER gotchas? Perhaps you could put them in RED and bold or something.
Thanks,
JMac
Saturday, 8. August 2009
Thank you for this informative post.
Thursday, 20. August 2009
I was messing with AIOSEO and don’t know really how to optimize it, luckily I googled and found this post, thanks for the tips.
Friday, 21. August 2009
This website article was extremely helpful. Thanks so much!
Tuesday, 1. September 2009
Thanks for providing this helpful article… Its really useful for people who are new to All in one SEO plug in in wordpress :)
Tuesday, 8. September 2009
Thanks for the suggestion about listing the possible gotchas better, John. I added this to the most recent update of the article.
Tuesday, 8. September 2009
Thank you very much for this posts! Really help me to understand a lot of things that everyone who use this plugin should know…
keep the very good work!!
Wednesday, 9. September 2009
thanks for the step by step guide it helped me a lot.. this is so informative post..
Monday, 14. September 2009
tq,now i know how to use this plugin :)
Monday, 14. September 2009
Hi Jack,
thanks for a great post – I tried to find this info on the official Plugin Support Forum, to no avail. I figured out the new post/page bits (Title Attribute & Menu Label) but all the “stuff” on the main page – canonical URLs etc. – had me a little baffled, so this is a clear concise “how to” – thanks!!
Regards,
Tracey Rissik, The Simple Web Company
Wednesday, 16. September 2009
First, I need a WP blog.
LOL
Hey, what do you know about blog enabling an existing site. Take a look at my web site and let me know what you think the feasibility of adding WP to this would be.
Thnaks!
Rob
Monday, 21. September 2009
Excellent article about one of the most popular WordPress plugins. Very useful thanks. Now, hopefully the All In One SEO Guys stop updating the Plugin so often …
Monday, 21. September 2009
Thanks! I was struggling to make sense out of the options for this plugin. You rock!
Monday, 28. September 2009
This is a brilliant article about the All in one SEO pack as I am a complete newbie to this and it was very informative. Thank you!
Thursday, 1. October 2009
This was extremely helpful… Thank you for taking the time to write it!
Sunday, 4. October 2009
thanks alot man,
See you in the top of google;)
Tuesday, 13. October 2009
Very Nice Dude!
Saturday, 17. October 2009
Great Article! I looked for a long time for an article like this.
Sunday, 25. October 2009
Thanks for making this. Im going to save this. The information on the pages i found most valuable.
Thursday, 29. October 2009
excellent information on all the features inside AIOSEO.
Thursday, 12. November 2009
Great post, very informative. Bookmarked and Dugg
Thursday, 12. November 2009
Thanks so much for this – it’s like making the fog vanish :)
Thursday, 12. November 2009
This is an awesome post. It should be attached to the download for the All in One SEO pack.
Your recommendation on “Dynamically Generate Keywords for Posts Page” is very important. You do want to do this manually otherwise you have no idea what keywords are being dynamically generated. Unfortunately, I found this out after looking at the Google Webmasters Tools for my site.
Now that I’ve unchecked it, I wonder if it goes back and updates all the posts I’ve made to remove those unwanted keywords. Some of them look like gibberish. I’m not sure if this helps or hurts, but it looks bad in Webmasters Tools at least.
Thursday, 12. November 2009
Joe – If I understand how the plugin works, I believe it stores it’s “stuff” separate from the actual post data. If that’s true, your posts should get cleaned up fast.
Fortunately, we know that Google does not use the META keywords for ranking – Yahoo does, but they barely count ;-)
Monday, 16. November 2009
I have the Autogenerate Descriptions enabled… so this is best?
Tuesday, 17. November 2009
Best – no. Acceptable, yes. You are the best judge of what the strongest possible, keyword inclusive description of your pages is. Any automated process is just a “best guess”. For day-to-day posts, auto-generate is fine, for posts you really want to do well, create your own.
Saturday, 28. November 2009
This post is THE “All in One SEO Pack” definitive resource. Many, many thanks for sharing this comprehensible tutorial. Bookmarked and share with my fellows!
Tuesday, 1. December 2009
This is very informative. Just installed it in our blog and your guide is helpful.Thanks!
Thursday, 3. December 2009
Thanks so much for finally explaining what the Menu Label and Title Attribute fields do
I couldn’t see them anywhere in the plugin documentation
Thursday, 3. December 2009
Glad I could help Laura!
Sunday, 6. December 2009
I printed your tips on AIO SEO in LARGE type on laminated paper, and have them hanging above my desk. They have been a big help in learning this “Black Art” of SEO.
Thanks for your efforts
Wednesday, 9. December 2009
I ditto all the nice comments to you. Very helpful.
One thing I am trying to understand is the purpose of the formats. I am working on improving my permalinks for both readability and SEO. I think the post, page, category, etc formats are in place of the usual wordpress options for creating/managing permalinks. Is this correct? or am I on the wrong path?
Wednesday, 9. December 2009
Steve – the various “formats” within All in One are not related to perma-links. They effect page titles etc, which by default come from your post titles and almost always could be modified to be a little stronger.
Wednesday, 16. December 2009
Great article…it answered all the questions I had regarding the SEO pack. I love how you laid it all out in order which made it very easy to follow and understand :).
Wednesday, 16. December 2009
Jack:
How have you been?
I jsut put up my first WP site. Yesterday in fact so it’s basically a framework at this point.
It can be quite easy and fun. You can also take it all the way down to nothing with one misplaced item in a PHP file.
LOL!
RM
Wednesday, 16. December 2009
Hey Rob – welcome to the WP family. Sounds like you may have learned this already, but ALWAYS keep a back up when you go tinkering with the code.
Wednesday, 16. December 2009
Thanks and no doubt!
I love how it just DIES and spits out an error message whenever a php file is not perfect. Like the old FORTRAN compiler back in Engineering school. (showing my age here).
It’s cool how there’s so much support and free stuff on there for WP.
I quickly and easily found a contact form and a fat widgeted footer and put those on the site in minutes.
Very cool.
I plan to flesh out this site and use it as a learning process, then take my main site http://www.atlantarealestateinfo.com/ to WP as well. Though that will involve a LOT more, in every direction.
Tuesday, 29. December 2009
Thanks for such detailed info. One question.. does the All in one seo override the settings under ‘permalinks’?
Wednesday, 30. December 2009
Jane – this plugin does not alter permalinks, you’ll need to get those set up on your own.
Wednesday, 30. December 2009
Great article! I am completely new to wordpress and all of its plungings. The SEO plugin guide you provided was great in helping me figure this all out.
Thursday, 31. December 2009
Thank you Jack. I did go and make sure the settings under permalink were correct as well as the SEO all in one settings.. your blog is SO valuable. Thank you for sharing all of your tips.
Friday, 1. January 2010
Very detailed configuration and helpful, I like it. Thanks so much…. :)
Saturday, 2. January 2010
The truth about Title Attribute revealed – thanks! Now if I can just figure out how to change a page title itself based on search results… any chance you hold workshops or mentoring sessions?
Friday, 8. January 2010
what do you want to comment about a big problem going on this days on aiosop’s broken title bug…sempfer designs is still not updating the problem.
and yes…your post is really very informative…
Monday, 11. January 2010
Sorry – I am not aware of a problem. My site and several others I know are using the plugin all seem to be fine. Are you sure it’s an AIO issue and not WordPress or your theme?
Monday, 11. January 2010
@Jack Leblond
As a site owner, i think i should inform you about a plugin which is 99X more powerful than AIOSEOP, title rewriting and meta things are like penny for it. it has 77 more features than aioseop..just see yourself, in my previous entry i told you about bug in the aioseop and its true with many other people..so i hope u should upgrade to this plugin. http://www.wpseo.org. do tell me how u like it…and whether i should apply this to all my wordpress site??
Monday, 11. January 2010
Just because something does more, does not make it better. In fact, by adding all these extra “features” it’s quite possible that they are doing more harm than good. Google has made it clear that page load time is, or will become a factor in ranking. Each plugin you add, and each process it must perform slows your site a little bit more. I looked at the link you provided and can see no reason why anyone should pay for that plugin.
Saturday, 16. January 2010
in my admin there is the field “description format” that can by default used with
* %description% – The original description as determined by the plugin, e.g. the excerpt if one is set or an auto-generated one if that option is set.
* %blog_title% – The title of your blog.
* %blog_description% – The description/tagline of your blog.
I now want also use %tag%, %post_title% and %page_title% within in the description format?? how can I use these “macros” addiotionally??
Please explain me in detail how to get this work as I am very new in coding stuff ;-)
thank you very much in advance!
bergblume
Saturday, 16. January 2010
I don’t know if you can use AIO like that, even if you could I would recommend you didn’t. Tags and titles have a place of their own and stuffing your description with them *could* be viewed as spammy by the search engines.
Saturday, 23. January 2010
Great article, helped me a lot.
Sunday, 24. January 2010
Thanks for this. I teach Wordpress, and I’ve got a good feeling I’ll be pointing a LOT of people to this post for reference. This is the best walkthrough I’ve seen on this topic.
Saturday, 30. January 2010
Hey, I just found your blog online today. I’m actually using this very theme for my fathers business. However, I’m having some trouble with my posts meta-title, keywords, and discription.
When I view my pages, I can see in the source everything I’ve manually entered into my All in One Seo Pack.
When i view the source of my posts, I can’t see anything I manually typed in. And I can’t see anything at the top of the page like in my pages.
How do I know that it is working for my posts? Is there any way to know?
I need to rank higher for some keywords, and my pages seem to be fine. but my posts arent getting ranks at all.
Can you advice on what I might be doing wrong?
Sunday, 31. January 2010
Very clear, well-written instructions. Thanks!
After adding the SEO plugin, I noticed that I have two description tags now – the one that my web developer put in and the one that I created in the All-in-One Seo plug-in.
Any suggestions as to why?
Wednesday, 10. February 2010
Hi Jack,
Thanks very much for this great article. Just started with wordpress and this plugin and this has helped a lot.
Cheers
Paul
Monday, 22. February 2010
@Herit, thanks a lot for your great review about wpSEO, we are glad that our users notice the difference to other Plugins.
@Jack, you are right! More features doesn’t mean it is better. But all features are SEO relevant, we try to keep wpSEO slim and lean, the execution time is very fast. We would love if you test wpSEO and let us know how you like it. You can download the Plugin at wpseo.org and use it for 10 days for free.
Thursday, 25. February 2010
I just wanted to tell you thank you for taking the time to prepare this document. It is a critical part of my working successfully with the All in one SEO Pack Configuations. My mentor even thanked me for sharing the information. Following your information, I am getting top ranking immediately on lesser ranked keywords sometimes within an hour from google. Since my site is new, it is wonderful. I am monitoring my rise through more competitive keywords, so I will see how it works there over a bit more time.
Sunday, 28. February 2010
All in one seo pack is a extraordinary plugin,thanks for such a high level infromation,I was searching it…