POP SEO Tip #6: How to Install SEO All-In-One For WordPress
Of all of the plugins available for WordPress blogs and websites, “All-In-One SEO” is perhaps the most popular. It makes optimizing your WordPress blog or website for search engines much easier than it otherwise might be.
If you’re not already using this for your business’s website or blog, then here’s a down-and-dirty guide for how to install the plugin and configure it.
What Is All-in-One SEO All About?
Since this plug-in came out in 2007, it has been downloaded more than 90 million times. It’s then gone on to be installed on more than 3,000,000 WordPress sites. As you might guess from the name, it’s a plugin solution that offers a variety of SEO solutions. Thankfully, it’s designed so people of all skill levels can use it.
This plugin came about through the work of multiple developers, but the most important one is Michael Torbert, who is a Meetup organizer and WordPress professional. This plugin is available in 57 languages but that number is constantly increasing.
All-in-One SEO Features
- Support of XML sitemaps
- Offers insights about readability for your pages and posts
- Provides support for Google Accelerated Mobile Pages and Google Analytics
- Includes customer user roles for SEO configuration needs
- Contains its own built-in API
- Features an SEO audit checklist for entire websites
- Provides integration with WooCommerce
- Works with schema markup
- Creates meta tags by default
What Does All-in-One SEO Cost?
The All-in-One SEO plugin is entirely free. However, there is a premium version that costs about $50 a year for a license on one site. It has a less expensive price than similar SEO solutions that work for WordPress, which is one of the reasons it’s so popular.
Keep in mind that some of the features are only available with a premium account. For instance, smart schema markup, custom breadcrumbs, WooCommerce SEO, and advanced SEO modules are a few that come to mind. At the same time, the free version is also very good and many people find that they never need to pay for an upgrade.
Now that we’ve talked about the basics of the plugin and what it offers, let’s get into the installation process.
Getting Started
- Get the Plugin: You can do this one of two ways; you can use the WordPress automatic plugin installer (where you will see it listed), or you can download the plugin from All-in-One SEO here and upload it to your website yourself.
- Activate the Plugin: After you’ve installed the plugin, you’ll need to activate it. Navigate to your WordPress website’s plugin tab, locate “All-in-One SEO” and activate it.
What Next?
After the plugin is installed and activated, you will then need to configure it. Here are the most important things you should configure:
- Activate Canonical URLs: In order to avoid duplicate content penalties, make sure this setting is active. You’ll find it under the plugin’s general settings.
- Fill Out Your Homepage Information: Be sure to fill in your website or blog’s title, and also provide a description that uses your main keywords and key phrases. Don’t worry about “Home Keywords”, as search engines no longer use these when indexing websites.
- Make Sure Noindex Settings are Active: Archived material can count against your website’s page rank when it’s indexed by web crawlers. By activating these settings, you’re preventing that from happening.
Final Thoughts
Outside of the above configurations, there are a lot of other features that are offered by this powerful WordPress plugin. Depending on the kind of website you have, you will want to investigate some of these other settings. Conducting a simple search about the plugin will yield a bevy of valuable resources for getting even more out of “All-in-One SEO”.