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WordPress is a great blogging tool, but SEO isn’t its strongest point.
This plugin is streamlined for some best practices for WordPress SEO. While it gives you many options the defaults reflect the settings I recommend using.
Titles
The text that you see in your browser’s window bar is the most important thing *on* your page. Make sure your titles are getting rewritten and the important stuff (your post titles) always come before anything else. You can leave a few words from your blog title to do some branding but don’t overdo. If your post titles don’t contain your most precious phrases you want to rank for then tweak them. Leave the post titles as it is but change the meta title.
Descriptions
Once your pages rank in search engines your description (aside of course from your title) makes a potential visitor want to click through, or not. It’s mta descriptions, believed dead by many people, that decide over your site’s fate. If you don’t want to invest the time and write a description for every post at least let them be auto-generated. This vastly better than the usual “Share This … Posted on … under …” description that is often used. If a post has an excerpt it is used, but not if you specify an explicit description.
Keywords
All in One SEO Pack can generate them from your categories (this was the old way of tagging your posts in wordpress) or from Ultimate Tag Warrior or, starting with WordPress 2.3, the built-in tagging system. Using your categories is optional, the rest is auto-detected and used if there.
Duplicate Content
You can have “noindex” and the like generated for archive-, category- and tag pages if you seem to have trouble with duplicate content.
That was about the 20% of effort needed by you to achieve 80% of results with on-page factors. Of course you also need incoming links, no plugin can do this for you in a safe manner.
Get this plugin here
