WP-SEO is the Ultimate Wordpress SEO Plugin – Throw the Rest Away

Thanks to Smashing Magazine, today I learned of the Wordpress or WP SEO plugin that can and will replace just about every other SEO plugin you may already have installed. I can tell you, since I installed it – I have deleted both “Optimal Title” and “HEAD Meta Description” wordpress plugins, as well as ““. As mentioned in the Smashing Magazine post – I think that this plugin is still relatively unknown to most people, I first heard about it today. Let me point out the reasons that this WP SEO plugin is so valuable:

• It allows you to change your html title tags
• You have fine grained control of making the title tag
• The title can be any combination of title, separator, blogname, label, or keywords
• You can individually choose a different title format for home, articles, pages, categories, search, archive, tag, or error pages
• Easily change the separator to anything you want (for instance, don’t use WP >> default, use | instead)
• Give separate labels to home, article, page, categories, search, archive, tag, or error pages for use in the title tag
• Choose to display the pagenumber, author, or even display a title field in your ‘write’ page to override with your own when required
• It allows you to convert your meta description tags
• Set a default value
• Choose either the default value, titles of all listed posts, or part of the first post as description tags
• Choose to use description of the category for category pages
• Individually assign different choices for meta description for home, articles, pages, categories, search, archive, tag, or error pages
• Choose the value for the number of words to be displayed in the meta description tag
• Enable a description field on the ‘write’ page to write your own description when required
• You can even convert the meta keywords tags
• Set a default value
• Set a dynamic value (as in the title and description options)
• Choose the number of words
• Choose the minimum number of letters for keywords
• Blacklist certain keywords
• choices for autocompletion, using only nouns, relevance, and labeling
• Enable a keywords field on the ‘write’ page to write your own when required
• An option for highlighting content areas using the adsense google_ad_section code
• Option to eliminate duplicate content indexing by automatically inserting robots nofollow tags on appropriate pages
• Option to not index RSS feed
• Rename uploaded files with title instead of filename
• An option to download all plugin settings in an XML file, so you can ‘import’ it in other sites you want to have the same settings (BIG time saver)

The only other thing you should know about this plugin are that before you activate it, you need to comment out any other title or meta keyword or description tags listed in your header.php file (which you most likely will have). If you’re not sure whether you got them all or not, this plugin even has a ‘compatibility check’ on the WP SEO plugin settings page that will look for double tags and alert you if there are any before you turn it on.

Not only does this plugin give the most fine grained SEO control for Wordpress I’ve ever seen – but it had one feature that I didn’t even know existed. There is one option to “Add meta name=’robots’ content=’noodp’ to sourcecode”. I had never seen this robots “noodp” tag before, so I googled it and came up with this page on How do I change my site’s title and description. Basically in a nutshell, the googlebot (when it indexes your pages) uses an automated algorithm to create the title and descriptions that will be seen by web surfers doing searches and getting the search engine result pages (SERP’s). The googlebot takes into account the content of a page and references to it on the web. To prevent search engines from automatically doing this – and force them to use your html title and description tags, you need to use the robots noodp tag in your pages (which this WP plugin will automatically do).

Now that I’ve enabled this plugin and setup the options I wanted, the next time the googlebot comes around to this site – it should dramatically change the way Search Optimization School web pages are indexed, and hopefully we get some much better rankings for quite a few. If you have comments about this plugin, or ways that you’ve dramatically enhanced your SEO in Wordpress – leave them now below!