WordPress is good for SEO because it knows how to present content properly to search engines. This quality is built-into WordPress and the majority of its themes — you don’t have to do anything about it. But there is a little more you can do with your on-page SEO in WordPress.
This guide includes some general tips and some settings specific to the popular All-in-One SEO Pack plugin.
Install AiOS and let’s begin.
Site-wide SEO Settings
Go to the plugin’s admin page and set your settings like this (sorry if some of these are obvious — there are other really good bits below):
Donate to the plugin and checkmark this.
Enable the plugin, because without this it won’t work at all.
Here’s where you set the <title> tag of your homepage. This should contain your main keyword and your brand. Try to stay within 66 characters total.
Now, the home description and keywords. For the description, enter a genuinely enticing description of your website and include your main keyword. Stay within 160 characters.
For the keywords field, don’t enter anything. Search engines ignore this field. It would only serve to add extra HTML to your site and reveal your targeted keywords to your competitors.
Checkmark “Canonical URLs” and “Rewrite Titles”
As for the titles of your post, page, category, tag pages, etc — set them like the picture below. But make sure that “Your Brand” is something short, unique and memorable. For this website I use, “WP ;)”
Don’t worry about it taking valuable space away from your <title> tag. Search engines know that the part after the pipe is just branding. In your posts title tags, you can still use the full 65 characters you have. Search engines will show the full 66-character description and will “…” the rest. Get more details here.
As for the rest of the settings, uncheck everything! Really, there is no need for any of it — unless you have something specific to add or exclude.
Save your settings.
Post-Specific SEO Settings
The settings above affect your entire site. Now there are some per post considerations:
The length of your post title shouldn’t exceed 66 characters. The main keyword for the post should appear in the title as early as possible.
When you’re customizing your permalink, consider making it hierarchical, if that makes sense for the structure of your content. Notice how I have credit-cards/american-express/. This tells search engines that the American Express page (american-express/) is a child of the more important page, Credit Cards (credit-cards/). WordPress doesn’t accept hierarchical URLs by default. You have to follow the instructions of this post to enable this feature.
Now — the excerpt. Because you have All-in-One SEO Pack installed, your excerpt becomes your <meta name=”description” content=”text in excerpt” /> tag. This is done automatically.
All-in-One SEO Pack adds an extra widget to your post edit screen.
These are absolutely useless. You can remove this widget from the “Screen Options” of WordPress.
That’s all! Check out these links for more essential WordPress optimization tips:
I know everything revolves around the “GIANT GOOGLE” – and I realize that Google doesn’t read meta keywords but I’ve learned that it can be beneficial for the smaller search engines? Your thoughts?
BTW – WinkPress is an awesome resource for WP users… what a boatload of info. My hat goes off to you for a remarkable job. Thanks!!
Hi Dom, Thanks for your kind words.
I don’t know if your site receives a significant amount of traffic from smaller search engines, but neither Google, Yahoo, nor Bing uses the meta keywords tags. It’s just extra work for you and it reveals your keywords to your competitors. I wouldn’t use it.
Please can you tell us why the all in one seo post widget is useless? I mean it might be so but I’d like an explanation to why it is useless, I don’t wanna miss out on some good seo’ing if it happens to be useful after all. Thanks!
Because “title” should be taken from the actual post title. Description will be taken from the “excerpt”, and the meta keywords tag is useless. It is not read by Google at all.