How to: Set up your All In One SEO plugin for search engine success

While I love Wordpress, it’s not all that search engine friendly right out of the box. But with a little bit of tweaking (and the help of a plugin or two), you can really set your site up to rank well and get the search engine spiders to visit regularly.

There are lots of SEO (search engine optimization – the technique of doing things on your site to improve how search engines rank you, how often they visit, what they “see” that your site is about, etc.) plugins out there for Wordpress, but my personal favorite is the All In One SEO pack plugin. For me, it takes care of all the most important optimization, while still being easy for clients to use. Because, I don’t care how fancy your SEO plugin is, if you don’t use it it’s useless!

To install the All In One SEO plugin, just visit your Plugins tab from the left-hand menu, and select “Add New“. By the way, if you don’t see a left hand menu in your self-hosted Wordpress Dashboard, you are on a much older version of Wordpress and should update before you do anything else. I recommend the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin to help you with that.

The video below will walk you through setting up the All In One SEO plugin, but before we do that, I wanted to go over a few terms and tips to get as much out of it as possible:

Definitions:

SE - Search Engines

SERP - Search Engine Results Page. This is where you want to show up – whether it’s on Google, Yahoo, Bing or any other search engine, you want to be found on the Results page (not the paid listings area), preferably on the first page. As you probably know from your own experience, people don’t generally go too far beyond the first or second page of results to find what they are looking for.

Meta - this is information about your site that is not displayed visibly to visitors on the page, but is visible in the code to the search engine spiders. The 3 areas you’ll fill out for the plugin will be the Title, Description and Keywords. The most important of the different meta types is the title, so you want to do your best to write up a short, concise title using keywords to describe the website.

Now, a few tips – your title is the most important section to fill out, so you might want to spend some time here. You are limited to about 70 characters (not words, but letters!) so it needs to be to the point. It needs to be readable and make sense to humans, but also tell the search engines what your site is about. So a couple good examples might be:

“How to handle employee conflict & learn conflict resolution at work – St. Louis”

“How to start a business – free tips, tools and resources for startups – Mary Jones”

When you’re writing these, think realistically about how you search. There will often be keywords that you really want to use, but if that’s not how your average client will search for you, those are not your best keywords. Most people are online looking for a solution to a problem. If you can phrase your title to solve that problem, you’ll usually do much better than if you try to use industry standard phrases that the average person isn’t familiar with. As you can see, we included things like “How to” and “tips” which go along with your keywords well for solving problems.

Lastly, it’s always a good idea to do some keyword research to see how people really search on your subject. You can do that at Google’s Keyword Tool, or on the free version of the Wordtracker keyword tool. Both should let you know how popular your keywords are, and hopefully give you some other suggestions to try as well. This is also an easy task to outsource to a VA if you don’t have the time or just don’t quite “get it”.

This is just a basic overview of SEO for your site, but if you spend a few minutes trying some keyword research and thinking realistically about how people will be searching for your site, you should be able to write some really great titles and descriptions for your site. And that alone will help you start to rank better!

Now get going and set up the All In One SEO plugin!

Oh, and one last thing – don’t worry too much about getting it perfect the first time! You’ll get new ideas for keywords, especially if you’re looking at your Google Analytics report on a regular basis, and you can always be tweaking your main site settings, along with the individual posts.