If we are using the WordPress CMS, it’s vital that we have an SEO plugin. If you’re using a premium theme, there is a good chance that your theme does have SEO integrated into their framework. If it does great, you can use that or install a third party plugin for your SEO settings. Let me introduce to you “All In One SEO Pack.”
Wait, before I get started, I did find a cool YouTube video that shows you the proper plugin settings.
So, once you install All In One SEO Pack you will find a drop down right under dashboard and above post in the backend of you SEO dashboard. There is a tab called “General Settings.” You need to make sure that these settings are configured correctly for the best SEO optimization results.
Under general settings, you will see the above screenshot. I should note that if you’re ever confused about the terminology, you can always go to https://semperplugins.com/documentation/ and read about what everything means. It’s very important that you have the field “canonical URLs” checked. This option will automatically generate Canonical URLs for your entire WordPress installation. It will help to prevent duplicate content penalties by Google. Also, make sure you have “Use Original Title” disabled.
Next, is the home page settings. You can see what this looks like from the screenshot above. You put in your home page title, description, and keywords. Make sure you don’t “keyword stuff” your keywords, though.
Next, is the keyword settings box. Here is what it looks like. Make sure you have “use keywords” enabled, use Tags for META keywords, and dynamically generate keywords for post page.
Next, is title settings. Here is what it looks like. Make sure rewrite titles is enabled, capitalize titles, capitalize and category titles are checked. You can edit your page, post, category, archive, date, author, tag, search, description format, 404 formats, and page format in this field, as well.
Next, is the custom post type settings. There are only two option SEO for custom post types and enable advanced options.
Next, is the display settings. You can show column labels for custom post types on posts, pages, media, and contact forms. You can also display the menu on admin bar and at the top.
You can configure your webmaster tracking with Google, Bing, and Pinterest.
Next, you can configure your Google settings. You can specify your Google Plus profile, display site links search box, advanced authorship (useless now), and connect with Google Analytics.
Next, you can adjust your noindex settings. You can noindex categories, archives, author archives, tag archives, search page, 404 pages, paginated pages/post, exclude from the Open Directory Project, and exclude the site from Yahoo Directory.
Finally, you can adjust the advanced settings. You can avoid excerpts, auto generates descriptions, run shortcodes in autogenerated descriptions, remove descriptions for paginated pages, never shorten long descriptions, unprotect post meta fields, exclude pages, additional post/page/front page/blog page headers.
Under the All In One SEO settings, you can click on performance which is a cool feature. It is enabled by default. You can always disable if you don’t want it active. It will show you the operating system, server, memory usage, MySQL version, SQL mode, PHP version, PHP support, WordPress version, active theme, active plugins and inactive plugins.
Also, you can adjust your memory limits, exception time, and enabled or disable “force rewrites”.
The feature manager is an awesome feature that is added into All In One SEO Pack. With this you can:
Active XML sitemaps.
social meta.
robot.txt (edit it right in your WordPress dashboard).
File editor (edit your .htaccess file right in the WordPress dashboard). Import and export your All In One SEO Pack settings, performance.
There is a video sitemap feature that is coming soon.
It’s pretty simple to use once you get all the settings configured on your site. Once you are in your pages or post you can insert your title, description, keywords, and noindex/nofollow robots, exclude from sitemaps.
It does show you a preview snippet of how your snippet will look in Google. Here is an example for one of my post I did on tbwhs.com:
Whenever you’re in your post/pages dashboard All In One SEO Pack automatically adds in SEO title, SEO description, and SEO keywords. It makes it easy to glance at your SEO on each page or post quickly.
This plugin is 100% free, but you can purchase a pro version of this plugin at https://semperplugins.com/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack-pro-version/
I have used this free version for many years. It is one of the “must have” plugins that you need if you care about your SEO and are using the WordPress CMS. There are many similar SEO WordPress plugins on the market. Some are free, and some are paid. However, this All In One SEO Pack plugin has stood the test of time. I would like to hear what you think of this SEO plugin; do you use it, and what are your thoughts on it? Please leave your comments down below.
Michael says
This was INCREDIBLY informative. I use the All In One SEO and there are some things you touched on that I never even realized. Thanks for the post and I have no doubt you’ll be helping lots of people out 🙂
I had my settings wrong for 4 months. I bookmarked this for future reference. Thanks!
Garen says
Glad it helped!
Emily Giguere says
Hi Garen
I agree with Michael that this is so informative and a great step by step post on All in One SEO pack. I actually went to my website as I read your post and double checked as I read that everything was correct. And it was! I had set it up a long time ago so it was a good refresher. I also was not familiar with the feature manager! I just checked it out on my site. I am thinking of activating the social media one. But what will it do exactly if I do activate it?
Garen says
Hey Emily,
That is a good question. I actually haven’t used these setting myself, but I did find a good video on YouTube which explains it:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/Dfe49FiiAog
Emily Giguere says
thanks Garen!
Jason says
The All In One SEO plugin is like one of the first plugins that I ever installed on my WordPress blog 2 years ago. It is really helpful to get my pages and posts to rank in Google and other search engines. I always wonder how the pro version compares to the free version.
Do you think that it is necessary to upgrade or should I just continue with the free version? If the free version is working really good for me what would the pro version do to make my ranking even higher?
I would like to know your thoughts on this since you have been online for over ten years now and must have a good knowledge on this.
Thanks again for a very useful post-Garen.
Best,
Jason.
Garen says
With All In One SEO Pack Pro you can:
Install the plugin on as many sites as you need.
Get free updates as long as you pay for your monthly subscription.
Get help for their team of developers.
They really don’t say much about it on their website. There are some features like:
New feature manager.
Video XML sitemap.
Advanced custom post type options.
More control over tags, categories, and custom taxonomies.
It does cost $39 and then $10 a month. I am actually contacting SemperPlugins to see if they can provide us with some more information on their paid version.
Nathan says
This is a odd question but why would you want to block categories from being indexed?
Garen says
There is a thing called duplicate content. The way Google sees this is each page to be unique (content wise). Meaning the same content doesn’t show up on more than one page. Let’s say you had a website that was about a WordPress contact plugin. It was filed under the “Wordpress” category.
Google indexes both the article and the category page. This is the same article just said two different ways. Hence, it’s considered duplicate content which Google doesn’t like.
Here is some good information on duplicate content:
https://yoast.com/duplicate-content/
Hopefully, that makes sense.