All In One Seo Pack Plugin for WordPress

All in one Seo pack for WordPress is one of the most popular plugins having being downloaded over 9 million times. It includes some of the basic Seo features you need to optimize your blog for the search engines.

In this tutorial, i’ll show you the settings and options for configuring the All in one Seo plugin for your WordPress blog.

Download All In One Seo Plugin

Click here to download All In One Seo Pack Plugin for WordPress

Initial Setup

All in one seo pack works straight out of the box so you don’t have to configure the settings if you’re a beginner. However, you will notice this red warning box once you install and activate the plugin and it is highly recommended to configure the plugin options for maximum benefit.

Firstly, you do need to enable the plugin and they ask that you make a donation. After you check these boxes, you can proceed to the configuration options before Updating the options to remove the red warning box.

Configuration Options

There’s a few options you’ll need to configure in order to enable this plugin. If you don’t, the plugin will still work ok.

Home Title: Enter your Home page title here otherwise your default blog title will be used so make sure you have set one or the other and use a keyword which describes the overall topic of your site. i.e If your site is about WordPress then a title like WordPress Sites is perfect.

Home Description: Enter a unique description here describing the different content on your site. If you don’t enter a description here then No description will be used. i.e I have set mine something like this. WordPress sites offers tutorials and How To’s on Everything WordPress including Plugins, Themes and Seo.

Home Keywords: You don’t need to enter anything here if you don’t want as the search engines don’t used meta keywords for Seo. You can enter some related keywords if you want but i don’t think it will make any difference. If you do, enter the main keywords only and don’t stuff this box with too many keywords.

Canonical URLs: Checking this box will make All In One Seo generate unique URL”s for your entire sites page and posts. No 2 permalinks will the same preventing duplicate content penalties from the search engines like Google.

Rewrite Titles: Checking this box will set all page, post, category, search and archive page titles to be rewritten. In my opinion its better to uncheck this so your page, post titles etc are used by default rather than Blog Archive >> Blog Name >> Post Title. If you do check this box, you can edit the templates for each tag to your liking.

Default Title Format Tags

All in one Seo offers a range of custom title formats tags tom choose from if you want to customize your Seo rather than use the default settings. Here’s all the Default Title Formats you can customize.

The reason i suggest you uncheck the Rewrite Titles box is because the default tags which you’ll see in the above screen shot aren’t the best option.

You wouldn’t want all your posts titles to include your blog title on the end of every post title as seen above.

Recommended Title Tags

The above screen shows the default title tag formats however you may want to consider changing to these recommended settings.

More Configuration Options

SEO for Custom Post Types: If you are using Custom Post Types which you have added yourself, via a plugin or included in your theme, then enable this box.

Google Analytics ID: Enter your Google Analytics ID here to track your site with Google Analytics if you haven’t already added it  somewhere else in your themes temaplates. If you haven’t already, you can read more on how to setup Google Analytics here.

Use Categories for META keywords: Check this box if you want your post categories used as the META keywords for this post.

Use Tags for META keywords: Check this box if you want your tags for a post used as META keywords for that post (in addition to any keywords you specify on the post edit page).

Dynamically Generate Keywords for Posts Page: Check this box if you want your keywords on a custom posts page (set it in options->reading) to be dynamically generated from the keywords of the posts showing on that page. If unchecked, it will use the keywords set in the edit page screen for the posts page.

No Index Settings

All 3 no index settings will help Avoid Duplicate content.

Use no index for Categories: Check this for excluding category pages from being crawled. 

Use no index for Archives: Check this for excluding archive pages from being crawled. 

Use no index for Tag Archives: Check this for excluding tag pages from being crawled.

Additional Configuration Settings

Autogenerate Descriptions: Check this and your META descriptions will get autogenerated if there’s no excerpt. In order to increase click through’s from the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) you would be better off to create a compelling description (excerpt) for each post which attracts more clicks. If you don’t, check this box so Meta descriptions will be autogenerated from your content instead.

Capitalize Category Titles: Check this and Category Titles will have the first letter of each word capitalized.

Exclude Pages: Enter any comma separated pages here to be excluded by All in One SEO Pack.

Additional Post Headers: What you enter here will be copied verbatim to your header on post pages.

Additional Page Headers: What you enter here will be copied verbatim to your header on pages

Additional Home Headers: What you enter here will be copied verbatim to your header on the home page.

Log important events: Check this and SEO pack will create a log of important events (all_in_one_seo_pack.log) in its plugin directory which might help debugging it. Make sure this directory is writable.

Update Options

Once you have configured All In One Seo Pack, click the Update Options buttons and you’re set.

Edit Post/Page Screen Seo Fields

Once Set, all in one seo pack will display Seo fields on every post edit screen for –

• Title
• Description
• Keywords

Title: You can enter a different title for the search engines here rather than use the default post title

Description: See the above Autogenerate Description configuration options. Its best to use some type of sales copy here to attract higher click through rates from SERPS. Your post description will not be used by the search engines to determine rankings however any keywords will be highlighted in  SERPS snippets which can be used to your advantage.

Keywords: Not used by the search engines so no point in adding anything here in my opinion unless you want to insert some for your own refererence.

Video – Options Configuration

Conclusion

Personally i think this is a great Seo plugin however i use WordPress Seo by Yoast because it includes a sitemap which is very important and 301 redirect options, amongst many others options, on all edit post/page screens.

You can easily migrate All In One Seo Pack Settings to WordPress Seo by Yoast using SEO Data Transporter plugin when changing themes and to the Thesis theme for WordPress .

Whats your favorite SEO plugin?