Is All in One SEO Pack plugin for the WordPress platform necessary? It’s one of the most used plugin for WordPress. Very popular. So, is it necessary? I’d say the answer is: yes, only if … I’ll explain.
Why is the plugin necessary?
- Some WordPress themes don’t use very well the Meta Titles and Meta Description tags; examples – putting the title of the blog in front of the title of the article, or not putting the name of the blog in the title, or putting in the title of the article not only the title of the article and of the blog, but also the description of the blog; also, the description of a blog post is sometimes ignored by some WordPress themes;
- The pages, categories, archives, tags, search pages are also important, and also they can sometimes be poorly made in a theme;
- The plugin is useful if you manage a lot of blogs, since it makes it a lot easier to control what gets indexed and what not;
What should you take care of, so the plugin becomes really necessary?
- There are three settings which come checked by default; you should always check that all these settings are unchecked:
- Use noindex for Categories;
- Use noindex for Archives;
- Use noindex for Tag Archives;
Why is the above caution necessary? I think that using noindex for categories, archives, tag archives can potentially create problems with indexing into Google; in my opinion, you should let Google decide what pages are important and what not, and not force Google not to index certain pages in your web site; in my opinion, especially if done automatically, as is the case with this plugin, this can lead into problems.
What should you take care of?
- In my opinion, the separator “|” used for separating between title items is somehow poor looking; I much rather prefer “-” as a separator;
- If you use the plugin for a blog in a language different than English, you should translate things like:
- Nothing found for %request_words%
- Part %page%
So, go and use All in One SEO Pack, if you know the noindex trick!
Hi, Kevin Stacey here..
First off, this post is extremely thorough! I don’t see too many bloggers going into detail like you have…that’s the mark of a blogger who knows their SEO plugin. For optimization, free plugins like All in One SEO Pack are really great as it lays down the basic SEO foundation for a WordPress site, but every blog is different and nothing works best for everyone.
I always suggest looking at a side-by-side comparison of the best seo plugins for WordPress in order to make an informed decision of what the best plugin is for that blogger and their website’s specific needs.
Here’s my most recent write-up on the subject:
SEO Pressor vs Easy WP SEO vs Scribe SEO
http://www.bestseopluginforwordpress.com/wordpress-seo/the-best-seo-plugin-for-wordpress/
Check it out and let me know what you think.
Great article btw…I’ll be referencing this post on my main blog.
Hi
i am Javid from Iran
My site had 7k Google visitors but suddenly it reduced to at least 100 in
last
two days.
I want to ask you is it a help If ] making all of the tags No-index or not,
because more than half of the visitors of my site includes google tags.
http://www.asio.ir
Thanks
Hi Javid,
Thanks for the kind email.
In my opinion, it is best not to do tags noindex.
Also, in your http://www.asio.ir/robots.txt file, I would remove most of the disallows. WordPress already has features which don’t allow a search engine to go through these directiories, and if you make something wrong, you can do a lot of damage.
I would also make the logo clickable, users are used to click on the logo / header area to go to the homepage.