Setting Up the All-in-One SEO Pack for WordPress | 2 | WebReference

Setting Up the All-in-One SEO Pack for WordPress | 2


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Setting Up the All-in-One SEO Pack for WordPress [con't]

Home Title

The Home Title field sets the value of the title tag for your home page. This is the title that visitors to your blog will see at the top of their browsers, as well as the title that search engines will use in search results. The page title of your home page is perhaps one of the most important parts of your SEO efforts. Come up with a title that is to the point, contains the most important keywords for your website, and contains less than 60 characters.

Home Description

The Home Description field captures the content that goes into the meta description tag of your website. This is the description of your website, which is generally not visible to visitors but search engines use it as part of the description of your website in results. The meta description content is quite important, and you should spend some time getting it right.

The one limitation that this bit has is that the text should not exceed 160 characters, but insert as many relevant keywords in it as you can. It can take some time and practice to get this right. You need to enter something here, and the text needs to evolve based on how well your website does in search result rankings.

Home Keywords

This is the section where you enter the content of the meta keywords tag -- various keywords that you have carefully selected for your website. These keywords can be single words or short phrases. Enter them separated by commas. Pick relevant keywords, the use of less relevant keywords might dilute your website's SEO efforts. Also try and enter more relevant keywords toward the beginning of the list. Again, it is quite unlikely that the keywords you pick for your website work wonders for you the first time. This list must evolve.

Canonical URLs

Put simply, a canonical URL is a search engine-friendly URL for your posts and pages. Using canonical URLs prevents duplicate content in URLs such as www.yoursite.com/page.html and yoursite.com/page.html, which search engines dock SEO points for when they find them on your website. I would suggest checking this option to enable this.

Title Settings

When you install and enable the All in One SEO Pack the plugin makes a number of settings changes to all the title settings in its configuration panel. Unless you find anything that you feel you need to tweak I suggest you leave these to the settings that All in One SEO Pack chooses (see Figure 1). For example, if you are very careful about picking apt category names for your articles you may want to check the option Use Categories for META keywords.

Figure 1. WordPress All in One SEO Pack Settings

Original: August 18, 2010


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