WordPress is a powerful CMS / Blogging software with one fatal flaw: it does not come with a way to modify your title tag and meta tags. Don’t freak out though, as there are plug-ins that will allow you to modify these all-important elements for SEO.
Having control of your title and description tags is one of the most important steps you can take to optimize your blog for search engines.
In this post I will cover the most important SEO elements for your page or post, and then we will take a quick look at the All in One SEO & Platinum SEO Plug-Ins for WordPress. All In One SEO and Platinum SEO are the two plug-ins that I use in our blogs, as well as the blogs of customers, to overcome the lack of SEO granularity that come standard with WordPress.
The important elements for optimizing your blog for search engines are:
- Title Tag: The title tag is what Google and other search engines display above the description in their search engine result pages.
- Meta Description Tag: The meta description tag influences the text that shows up below the title in the search engine result pages. I say “influence” because sometimes Google, Bing, Yahoo!, etc. use relevant content from your page instead.
- Meta Keywords Tag: This tag has become pretty irrelevant to search engines because people used to fill it with a ton of keywords (spam). You should use 4-8 keywords that describe and are used in your post.
- Meta Robots Tag: This tag can tell the search engine many things, but there are only a few that we are worried about.
- index - tells the search engine robot to add the post or page to the index.
- noindex - tells the search engine robot not to add the post or page to the index.
- follow - tells the search engine robot to follow all the links on the post or page.
- nofollow - tells the search engine robot not to follow the links on a page or post.
Plug-Ins for WordPress Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
I currently use two plug-ins, Platinum SEO and All in One SEO, to add control of the Title and Meta Tags to WordPress. These Plug-ins are very similar, but do have some differences that may affect you and your blog.
- Platinum SEO & All in One SEO Similarities
- Homepage: These Plug-Ins offer control of the Title Tag, Meta Description Tag, and Meta Keywords Tag in their settings pages.
- Post: These Plug-Ins offer control of the Title Tag, Meta Description Tag, and Meta Keywords Tag at the post level, scroll down to the bottom of the post while editing and you will see the boxes for this.
- Page: These Plug-Ins offer control of the Title Tag, Meta Description Tag, and Meta Keywords Tag at the page level.
- Auto-generate: Both offer options on their settings page that allow you to auto-generate descriptions.
- Tags & Categories as Keywords: You can set the tags and/ or categories to pull as your Meta Keywords. I pull the tags as my keywords and it saves me one step, just make sure not to put over 8 tags.
- Platinum SEO & All in One SEO Differences
The major difference between the two is that Platinum SEO allows you to control the Robots Meta Tag on your post & pages. All in One SEO does not have options that allow you to keep single pages from being indexed / followed. This is a pretty big deal if you want to keep certain pages out of the search engine indexes.I have also run into issues these Plug-Ins when they interact with certain themes; however, one of the two has always ended up working and I haven’t had this issue in a while thanks to the constant upgrades that the developers of these Plug-Ins offer.
WordPress SEO Plug-In Review: Conclusion
Both of these Plug-Ins offer the necessary elements to optimize your WordPress Posts & Pages for search engines, and both are also updated & upgraded by their developers to stay compatible with the upgrades to WordPress.
Platinum SEO offers the Robot Tags option at the post and page level which is an important feature to me, but it may not be to you. If you aren’t worried about keeping certain pages or posts out of the search engine indexes then you can’t go wrong with either All in One or Platinum SEO.
In the box below are links to both the WordPress.org pages for these plug-ins which have customer reviews and the developer pages which have FAQ and other Support. If you do end up using one of these Plug-Ins, make sure that you make a donation to the developer. They need to eat too!
Resources
Platinum SEO Plug-In at WordPress.org: Platinum SEO
Platinum SEO Plug-In Homepage: Platinum SEO
All In One SEO Plug-In at WordPress.org All In One SEO
All in One SEO Plug-In Homepage: All In One SEO
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Are you aware of any compatibility issues between the Thesis Theme and Platinum SEO? We have noticed several major issues since installing it; however, we do not know if it caused the issues yet. We just started problem determination.
Gail,
With Thesis 1.6 you shouldn't need Platinum SEO. Thesis provides the already provides the boxes for your meta tags at the post level. The Home Page is in the theme options I believe. I would check which version of Thesis you are using, and then upgrade it so you don't have to use a plugin for SEO. I hope that helps, if not let me know.
It is in my experience that Platinum SEO provides the more comprehensive onpage optimization features with automatic 301 redirects for your permalink changes, auto-generated post and page titles, canonical URLs, title and meta description overrides, and custom taxonomies.
I believe that may even be a little more comprehensive than what’s offered in Thesis, but I haven’t checked the Thesis SEO updates. Nevertheless, between AIO Seo and Platinum SEO this post does a good job of contrasting the two.
I’ll be referencing this post on my main blog.