All in One SEO Pack is a popular choice among all the SEO plugins for WordPress. However, the plugin comes with lots of options and customization opportunities. If you are a beginner, you may find it hard to set up all the options on your own.
That is why we have decided to create a simple beginners guide to All in One SEO Pack. After reading this article, you will have a clear idea about how to use the plugin and which options to choose. Let’s get started.
Installing the Plugin
First of all, download and install All in One SEO Pack in your website. Once you activate the plugin, you will notice a new menu item titled ‘All in One SEO’ in the dashboard.
All the settings of the plugin are located at the All in One SEO > General Settings page. The page is helpfully divided into different sections. I will discuss each section and show you the recommended options. However, you should keep in mind that the settings will vary depending on your requirements. Therefore, if you definitely know that you need to enable an option which I have not recommended, you should enable it anyway.
Setting up All in One SEO Pack
In the settings page, my first recommendation is to leave the ‘General Settings’ as it is. By default, it will enable canonical URLs and disable original titles. This is fine for us.
Home Page Settings
Then, in the ‘Home Page Settings’ section, you will find separate fields to provide the title, description, and keywords for your home page. Try to use your most important keyword in the title. For the description, try to limit it within 156 characters and include multiple major keywords. In the keywords field, provide 5-10 most important keywords of your website.
Keyword Settings
From the Keyword Settings section, you can choose how the plugin will handle meta keywords for the posts and pages of your website. While it is possible to add keywords separately for each post and page, you can choose to add the tags and/or categories also. Check the last box only if you are using a static home page.
Title Settings
This section allows you to customize the default titles for various pages of your website including single posts, pages, tags, archive, search, category, etc. All the default options of this section are fine; you should keep all of them except one. That is, if you are creating lots of landing pages you might want to remove the ‘| %blog_title%’ part from the page title.
Custom Post Type and Display Settings
In these two setting sections, you can define the SEO rules for custom posts and the general display settings for your website. I recommend you to not change any of the default settings in either of these sections.
Webmaster Verification Settings
In this section, you can provide the verification code that you received from Google, Bing and Pinterest. In order to improve the SEO performance of your website, it is very important to get the verification code from all three sources and use them whenever necessary.
Google Settings
Here, you can add Google authorship to your site by providing your Google Plus profile URL. You will also find a button to connect your website with Google Analytics.
No Index Settings
By using the options of this section, you can disable indexing of various sections of your website such as the category page, archives, tag archives, search page, 404, paginated posts, etc. While it is a debated issue, I prefer to keep the categories section unchecked.
Advanced Settings
This section provides you with some additional options like avoiding the excerpt in descriptions, generating descriptions automatically, removing descriptions for paginated pages, exclude page(s) from the plugin, custom headers for the posts, pages, blog page and the front page. After making all the changes, click ‘Update Options’ and you are good to go.
Final Words
So, that is how you set up All in One SEO Pack for WordPress. Are you using this plugin in your site? If yes, please share your experience with us by leaving a comment below. And if you are using any other SEO plugin, don’t forget to share the plugin name too.