SEO All In One Settings

[cap2031]

Are we going to go over some of the settings for some of the plugins?

I installed the Wordpress direct blog, and did not change any of the default settings. Since Ed said that these guys have set this up for complete SEO domination .

However, it seems that the All in One plugin could have better default settings. Their support page also shows different settings. What is the best?

Use Catagories for Meta keywords (unchecked) [Don't buy it?]
Une noindex for Catagories (checked) [Don't buy it]
Use noindex for archives (checked) [on I buy it]
Use no index for Tag Archives (unchecked) [dunno?]
Autogenerate Descriptions (checked) [ok I buy it]

Help Guru Bob!

[cap2031]

Has anyone else had any concerns about the All in one SEO settings?

[novac]

Very good question that I hope someone answers.

[OneOfEm]

I just made a video showing how to configure it - it should be detailed enough for those who haven't ever logged into the wp-admin screen.

[novac]

Thank you...excellent! Didn't know whether to comment on the page or not

Originally Posted by OneOfEm

I just made a video showing how to configure it - it should be detailed enough for those who haven't ever logged into the wp-admin screen.

[DavidW]

Here's a little bit of the theory behind some of these settings:
Meta keywords are totally useless and there's no reason whatsoever to generate them. If you don't believe it you can run an easy test find a unique string of letters not indexed anywhere else. Put this only in your meta keyword tag (nowhere in the post) Do a small post and wait till it gets indexed, then search for your unique word/string of letters.

Noindex for categories? Frankly this depends on the structure of your blog and it's all about how you pass page rank. If you use keyword targeted categories that you show on the home page you may want to pass page rank from these to your posts.

Noindex for the rest? The theory is simple. Your pages only have so much page rank that page rank gets distributed to every link on your page that is a followed link dividing it as it goes. You're trying to preserve as much of that rank as possible for your posts/pages. The problem is to a search engine www.myblog.com/tag/mykeyword/ is a different page than www.myblog.com/category/mykeyword/ since your page rank is divided among all the links your diluting it by passing it to multiple pages with the exact same content.

Hope that helps. You might want to look up some of Aaron Wall's work on this for a more in depth explanation.

Originally Posted by cap2031

Use Catagories for Meta keywords (unchecked) [Don't buy it?]
Une noindex for Catagories (checked) [Don't buy it]
Use noindex for archives (checked) [on I buy it]
Use no index for Tag Archives (unchecked) [dunno?]
Autogenerate Descriptions (checked) [ok I buy it]

[novac]

Hi OneofEm;

Thanks, that really helps with those boxes. There are others though.
The current SEO settings on a blog just installed:

Rewrite Titles: is Checked
Post Title Format is: %post_title% | %blog_title%
Page Title Format is: %page_title% | %blog_title%
Category Title Format is: %category_title% | %blog_title%
Archive Title Format is: %date% | %blog_title%
Tag Title Format is: %tag% | %blog_title%
Search Title Format is: %search% | %blog_title%
Description Format is: %description%
404 Title Format is: Nothing found for %request_words%
With all of these you can click and see what they are for and what they mean, duh? But on the 404 one it looks as if you (I) need to set a preferred page if a 404 is reached?
Then we move along to:
Paged Format is: - Part %page%
Use Categories for META keywords: is unchecked
Use noindex for Categories: is checked
Use noindex for Archives: is checked
Use noindex for Tag Archives: is unchecked
Autogenerate Descriptions: is checked
Log important events: is unchecked
Then the update button
whew!
I hope I'm not the only one who doesn't know all this and that your reply would help all. These are settings that have never been touched, they're "stock", hence the BIG question.
Are these correct? It seems like one wrong setting could really help or hurt.

Thanks very much...
novac

Originally Posted by OneOfEm

I just made a video showing how to configure it - it should be detailed enough for those who haven't ever logged into the wp-admin screen.

[harvardave]

Hi - this is Marty from WordPressDirect. I'm not sure how your SEO plugin got de-activated. We have all these activated in the template install. It is possible however, since we did find hosts that were blocking XML-RPC and we had to work around some of these issues during the challenge. If you find that the SEO plugin is not active on your site, please file a ticket.

However, the settings you are filling in your video are done by WPD in the typical install. The homepage metadescription is filled using the brief description in the website settings page, and the metakeywords are filled using your site keywords, also in website settings in WPD.

The result is, when you look at your site in Market Samurai, all on-page factors should be optimized. Again, if this is not the case, please file a ticket.

Originally Posted by OneOfEm

I just made a video showing how to configure it - it should be detailed enough for those who haven't ever logged into the wp-admin screen.

[wstaton01]

very informative. I have 3 wordpressdirect installed sites and found the seo plugin activated on all three. Where I had the problem is that few of the options were used. The seo plugin allows you to customize each post specific to the keyword for that particular post. I found the seo plugin field blank on all the posts I did. This means the plugin uses only the main site keywords for all posts. The post seo field allows you to overcome this by entering titles, descriptions and keywords aligned to the post subject. ( like in one of my blogs the main keyword is "garden Lawn Mowers" and I have a post for that and other posts "walk behind lawn mowers" "toro lawnmowers") where I have set the main keyword as these for these posts. Also with the absence of a description the first 150 odd characters in your post is used and that is what appears in google. This may not be what you want because you want your description in to be a lead to your blogs post to entice people to visit.

Like a number of people I still need to fathom out exactly what some of the other seo plugin fields do. Appart from this I think the plugin an excellent tool.

[BrentH]

Originally Posted by harvardave

The result is, when you look at your site in Market Samurai, all on-page factors should be optimized. Again, if this is not the case, please file a ticket.

If you can read HTML, and know your site is optimized, let us know instead of Marty - Market Samurai uses a series of predefined "rules" to tell whether a site is optimized.

I know that there have been a few quirky examples where the rules weren't broad enough to be accurate in working out whether a site was optimized or not - most of these should be worked out now, but I expect there will be new and even quirkier ways that have still slipped through the cracks.

Brent