Buzz Mommy

If you are a wordpress blogger looking to boost your SEO, try All-in-One SEO Plugin.

This plugin allows you to enter a title, description and keywords for your blog and for your individual posts and pages. These meta tags factor into how relevant your post appears to a search engine when it lists results and also to readers searching for information.

At #GNO, some bloggers were asking how to use this plugin.

Basic, out of the box usage of this plug-in will improve your blog’s search engine friendliness, with the usual caveat that this is just the surface of SEO, and that SEO is not the end-all-be-all of a successful site.  Google claims not to use meta tags in indexing. Anecdotally, however, I have noticed that good title meta-tags and reversing the post title and blog name have improved both search results and search engine traffic.

Click below to see the explanation of how I used All-in-One SEO in this example.

You can see in the above example the words for which I searched are bolded.

For both your blog itself (go to your settings to change this) and for your post or page (these fields should appear below the post when you are writing), All-in-One SEO Plugin allows you to input the following “meta tags”:

TITLE: This is different from the title of your post listed on your blog. If you want to give your post a funny or clever title, that may not have the relevant keywords. So, this field allows you to input a more bland but descriptive title. Above, the real title is “10 Tips for Pitching Mommy Bloggers.” Not much difference in this case but I think you can see how the meta title can be different from the post title. You still want this title to be reader friendly as it will appear in search engine results and at the top of the reader’s browser, but it does not have to be as eye-catching as the title on your blog.

DESCRIPTION: Some search engines use this, others just grab the first however many letters of your post. Just in case, write a concise description, using relevant keywords.

KEYWORDS: Here’s where you can place any relevant keyword phrases (including common misspellings) that someone is likely to type into a search engine. These are just short phrases separated by a comma.

PERMALINK: This is not part of the plugin, but just appears below the actual title of your post. You should set your permalinks to be the title of your blog instead of a random number. However, as I mentioned, sometimes the title is more clever than searchable. So, you can also change the permalink to include keywords.

Settings for All-in-One SEO

You can really just use this plugin as-is. Shawn Joostelists it as one of the 9 Wordpress SEO Must-Haves (via ProBlogger)  Enter the meta tags for your blog’s homepage in the settings area and then experiment with the tags on the posts.

One good box to check is to re-write the post titles so the title, category, or tag appears before the Blog Title.  This helps with search because the closer the keywords are to the beginning, the better. This also makes it easier for your readers to use social bookmarking as many of these sites auto-input the post title and you want the post title, not your blog title, to feature more prominently.

Now you just need your SEO keyword research!