In my last post about SEO, I gave you a short review of  All In One SEO Pack, the best WordPress plugin for SEO of your blog. We discussed about all its great features, but we limited our scope only till its features. I didn’t tell you about how to use it? How to configure it? Well in this post I will do it! Lets begin…

After you have activated the All In One SEO Pack plugin in your blog, go to the All In One SEO Pack options panel. To do so click “All In One SEO” in your WordPress Admin sidebar or menu bar if you use some plugin for menus.

After you are in the All In One SEO Pack options panel, check the “Plugin Status” box to “Enabled” in order to activate the plugin.

Move down… In the “Home Title” column type the name of your blog or the title of your blog or the name of your homepage. As the name implies, this will be the title of your homepage. If  it is not set, the default title of your blog will be used.

One step down, there is a box named “Home Description”. Here you can type your blog description that you want to appear in search engines and else where they are used. This is the META description for your homepage. If this isn’t set, no description will be used for your blog in search engines and else where they are used and you can be in loss with SEO.

Below “Home Description” there is a column called “Home Keywords”. Here you can type your blog’s keywords. These are the META keywords that are used in your blog homepage. These are very important for some engines. But some major ones like Google don’t use it! But still there are  many others which use them! So why not try your luck with them? Do not stuff all the keywords here. Only put in the important keywords. Don’t use words like “the,can,etc”here.

Below this are “Canonical URLs and Rewrite Titles”. Checking the first option enables automatic generation of Canonical URLs for your entire WordPress blog installation. This will help to prevent duplicate content penalties by Google which can be levied on you on pretext of same content. This is a must check option.

The second option is all about the title tag. This is what you see in your browser’s window title bar. (Top Of The Browser Screen). This is not visible on a page or a post or in fact any part of your blog,  but only in the windows title bar and of course in the source code of your blog. If set, all page, post, category, search and archive page titles get rewritten. You can specify the format for most of them.

For example: The default templates puts the title tag of posts like this: Archive –> Blog Name –> Post Title. This is far from optimal. With the default post title format, Rewrite Title rewrites this to Post Title | Blog Name. If you have manually defined a title (In one of the text fields for All in One SEO Plugin input) this will become the title of your post in the format string. Its always better to enable this option.

Below this option you can specify the titles of the various parts of your blog as they appear in your browser title bar as well as source code. Fill in the titles and other information according to your wish. Specify appropriate titles to posts, pages, categories, archives,tags,search titles, descriptions, Error 404 titles and the format of your blogs pages the ones that take appear in “Previous Page – Next Page” below your blog if its added,

Check the first box if you want your categories for a given post used as the META keywords for that post (In addition to any keywords and tags specified on the post edit page). Check the second box if you want your tags for a given post used as the META keywords for this post (In addition to any keywords and tags specified on the post edit page).

Check the third option if you want your keywords on a custom posts page 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. Always good to check this option.

The next three check boxes should always be checked. These are Use noindex for Categories,archives,tag archives. Check the three of these. This is useful for avoiding duplicate content in your blog and be safe from penalties.

The next option is “Autogenerate Descriptions”. Check this if you want your META descriptions to be  autogenerated if there’s no excerpt specified. Good to check this, in case you forget to enter an excerpt any time. The next option is to capitalize category titles. I have checked it as per my wish and you can as per yours. It won’t affect your blog anyway leaving the display of categories.

Below these options are they “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.

Below this option are the Additional Post Headers, Additional Page Headers, Additional Home Headers options. 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,etc. Use these options with caution and carefully.

The below option is a troubleshooting tool from the developer of this plugin. If checked and a significant event happens which is unusual, it will be logged. No problems in checking this option.

Let us next move on to All In One SEO Pack Post and Page configuration or how to use them.

FOR POST:

Type the title of your post in the first column as you would like it to appear in search engines. If you want to compete with other bloggers of your type, it is always good to enter a title here. Let the primary keyword of the post be in very beginning. Avoid stuffing in keywords here. It really looks odd! If not specified, the default post name will be used.

Below title is the description box, where you can enter the post description as you would like it to appear in search engines. Type description carefully and closely. Type the most important and best keywords in the extreme start of description. Avoid using useless keywords, the ones which no one searches for.

Below this is the keywords box. You can type the META-keywords for the post here in this section. Put the most important keywords here.

FOR PAGE:

Enter the title of the page as you would like it to appear in search engines. If not specified, the default page name will be used. Always best keywords describing your site.

Below it type the description for the page as you would like it to appear in search engines. Its always good to use the best keywords that describe you and your blog or site.

Below this is the keywords box. You can type the META-keywords for the post here in this section. Put the most important keywords here. Type the important keywords in the extreme beginning.

Next is the “Title Attribute” column. The characters you type in this column will become the link title text for links to this page. Link titles are the ones which appear when you hover over a link. This is an added feature for added advantage.

Moving down, we reach to “Menu Label”. Text used here will be titles for your site menus for that specific page. If you leave it blank the default page title will be used.

Below is a check box named ” Disable on this page/post”. If for some reason you wish to not use the SEO pack on a page, check this box. Mostly I recommend, not to check this box unless situation really demands.

That’s the end of this post! Hope you enjoyed reading it and now all your doubts are clear?