Use AllinOne SEO plugin to it’s fullest potential

Was talking to a webmaster friend yesterday and he asked me if the All in One SEO plugin is really doing any good. The reason was that he’ve been using the All in One plugin and could not really find out any significant results with it. I asked him what he did with him, to which he replied that he had installed it and is waiting for the results. Ahha…I asked the same question to a few more webmasters and 3 out of 7 told me they weren’t really sure how to use the plugin. They’ve installed it and kept it as it is expecting results.

So that’s exactly why this post comes to you today. This is for those who have been using the All in One SEO plugin (and knows not fully about it) and for the ones who are planning to use it.

What is the All in One SEO plugin for ?

All in One SEO plugin does not take care of everything SEO. It takes care of three things on your blog.

1 – Your title tags
2 – Your meta tags (Keyword and Description)
3 – Your no index properties for a page

Your title tags are that line of text that appear on the browser window while loading your page.

For a normal blog, they are navigation helpers and appears something like Yourblogname>> Blog Archive >> Post title, and it appears almost the same (last part changes) on all the posts.

Results?

All the pages will carry more or less the same title. And you might already know that title tags are one of the most important SEO metrics.

All in One SEO plugin helps you have unique Page Titles for each post, completely configurable so that you can “make them” SEO friendly.

Essentially, you can use the title tags uniquely on post pages, homepages, category pages, tag pages, archives etc.

The real power of All in One SEO plugin

The real power lies not in the right settings but how you use individual posts to leverage on your keywords.

All in One SEO plugin will help you show a completely different page title (what appears on the browser window) than the original post title. As for the normal blogs, both are the same. Using the All in One SEO plugin, you can change the page title after publishing your post and make it more palatable for the search engines.

I agree that SEO friendly page titles are not always human friendly. For the same reason, many a times, we are confused which format to follow. Now, AllinOne SEO helps you out of the situation. While you publish a post, create a user friendly page title, may be  the same post title. But soon after it get’s read by all and is pushed to to archives, it might be good idea to change the page title to a much more SEO friendly format.

So a user reads a user friendly version (spotted on the post title on the page) and search engines sees a keyword rich seo version (seen on serps and browser window). Just make sure you don’t over do it.

Same formula should help and work with meta descriptions, but I’m unsure if they will directly affect the search rankings, but hey we have an option so use it anyway.

Some more power uses for All in One SEO

All in One SEO comes with an option to selectively use “meta nofollow” tags on posts, pages or categories.

With this option, you can chose if you want to block search engines from crawling category pages, single post pages, pages and tag pages. It simply adds a meta nofollow tag while the option is checked in the options menu.

This is an excellent tool to avoid duplicate content issues on your blog. You could opt for nofollow-ing your category, archive and tag pages and leave the posts pages so that there is no duplication. Check out the screenshot to see what I mean.