All In One SEO is one of the most complete SEO plugins for WordPress. Below we go over some of the main features of All In One SEO and our preferred settings for each one.
Meta
Meta information is integral for search engine optimization, as it lets Google and other search engines know what your website or page is about. All In One SEO makes managing your meta information extremely easy, automating the entire process.
Our Preference
It’s important to have a unique meta title and meta description for each page and post of your website. Both the title and description let Google know what the page is about, and having unique meta titles and meta descriptions let Google know that the pages and posts are all unique.
For posts, we set up the title as: %post_title%
For pages, we set up the title as: %page_title%%
For the description (which includes all pages and posts), we set it as: %description%
Taxonomy
Taxonomy refers to the indexing of certain elements on your website. Using All In One SEO, you can select what elements are indexed, and which ones are blocked from being indexed.
Our Preference
You may think that you want everything to be indexed, however, it’s generally a good idea to set category and tag archives to noindex. This helps avoid duplicate content penalties, as many bloggers and WordPress site owners have numerous tags and categories attributed to posts, which can create many pages of seemingly similar content.
Sitemap
The sitemap is absolutely critical when it comes to SEO. A sitemap consists of a .xml archive page that creates a hierarchy of every page and post under your domain. This helps Google and other search engines find your website and understand which pages are most important.
Our Preference
Generating the sitemap page is quite straightforward with All In One SEO. Once the All In One SEO plugin is installed, simply go to “feature manager” when hovering over the All In One SEO tab. There you can select the sitemap feature, which generates a sitemap page for your domain.
One very useful feature with this sitemap builder is the ability to add pages that are not part of the WordPress part of the website. Meaning, if only a portion of your website runs WordPress, you can easily add non-WordPress pages to the sitemap and determine their hierarchy.