SEO Hosting Blog

By now, chances are that you’ve heard of the All in One SEO Pack plugin for WordPress. In fact, we’ve talked this SEO plugin on our blog before. While everyone is always saying that it’s a great plugin to use, most descriptions (including our previous ones) don’t dig into everything that this plugin can do. Whether you have a little experience with this plugin or you haven’t used it yet, let’s take a look at everything it’s capable of doing:

Once you install and activate the All in One SEO Pack, click the “Settings” link in your admin area, then the “All in One SEO” link. From the page that appears, you will be able to control the broad settings for your WP blog or website. Some of the available settings include:

Home Title: Customize your site’s title. Because you may only want to display a short and sweet title in your site’s actual design, this option can be used to display a juicier title for search engines to display.

Home Description: If you don’t have a description, search engines will just take a snippet from your homepage to display. For most blogs, a snippet from the latest post isn’t going to explain what the whole blog is about. Adding a compelling description with the help of this option can increase the number of searchers who click through to your result.

Home Keywords: While meta keywords are no longer a major ranking factor, it doesn’t hurt to use this option to enter your core keywords.

Custom Titles: This plugin allows you to choose a custom format for the titles throughout your site. The main ones most people care about are post and page titles. However, this plugin also gives you control over archive, category, search and tag titles. This option can be helpful in ranking well for some of your long-tail keywords.

Use Tags for Meta Keywords: This option allows you to create WP tags based on the meta keywords you use for your posts and pages. This can be beneficial for your SEO efforts, as well as helping visitors find their way around your site.

Noindex Archives and Categories: Some blogs may want their category pages to be indexed. However, there are plenty that don’t have anything to gain from these pages being indexed. If you fall into the second category, you can use this option to add the noindex attribute to your category pages.

In addition to controlling broad settings for your site, you can also make changes to individual posts or pages. Useful options include:

Title: This option can be used to display a more keyword rich title in the search engines. This option also includes a character counter to help you craft the perfect length for your title.

Description: Use this option to entice searchers to click through to your post or page. Like the title, this option also includes a character counter.

Menu Label: If you want to give a page a descriptive title, but you don’t want a long title to show up in your site’s menu bar, you can use this option to display a shorter page title on your menu.

If you already have an established WordPress blog or website with lots of incoming links, you probably don’t want to change your current permalink structure!

You may already know how to customize your WordPress blog or website’s permalinks so they look better. If you need a quick reminder:

-Click “Settings” on the left side of your WordPress Dashboard

-Click “Permalinks” from the drop-down menu that appears

-Choose the “Custom Structure” radio button

-You’re free to use any custom permalink structure that you want, but the most popular choice is:

While that will take care of many of your permalink issues, what if you’re in the following situation:

You’ve decided to use WordPress to create your own version of an article directory. For this project, you want to structure your directory by using Pages instead of Posts. For your top level of navigation, you’re creating Article, Picture and Review categories. Within your Review category, you have a Web Hosting Reviews category. For your first review within this sub-category, you decide to write about how much you like SEO Hosting. While your review is great, there is one thing you don’t like about it: its permalink. Although you’re using a “Custom Structure” for your permalink, because your review is a beneath a sub-category and category, it’s permalink looks like this:

http://www.myc00ldirectory.com/reviews/web-hosting-reviews/seo-hosting-review/

Not only is that long, but there’s no need for it to contain the word review(s) three times. And while you can edit the “seo-hosting-review” portion of the permalink, by default WordPress won’t allow you to edit the “/reviews/web-hosting-reviews/” portion.

The question is how do you create a simpler permalink while maintaining the structure of your directory?

As with a large percentage of WordPress issues, there’s a plugin to help you. Custom Permalinks gives you full control over your blog or website’s permalinks.

To use this simple but powerful plugin, download it from the WordPress directory. Once it’s downloaded, unzip the file and upload the unzipped folder to the WP-Content Plugins directory on your server.

Once the plugin is uploaded, log into your WordPress Dashboard and activate it as you would any other WordPress plugin.

In our example, after the plugin is activated, you would go back to your SEO Hosting review. Instead of seeing:

http://www.myc00ldirectory.com/reviews/web-hosting-reviews/seo-hosting-review/

and only being able to edit the “seo-hosting-reviews” section of the URL, you will see the following:

Thanks to the Custom Permalinks plugin, you’ll be able to publish your great review with a descriptive but simple URL:

http://www.myc00ldirectory.com/seo-hosting-review/

I really like the Twenty Ten theme from WordPress because it’s clean and easy to customize. In addition to using this theme for a blog, it’s also easy to use if you’re building a website with a WordPress backend.

One of the cool features of the Twenty Ten theme is its header. Not only is the header large and attractive, but this theme gives you the ability to use a different header on every page and post.

While the theme comes with a handful of header images, to make your blog or website unique, it’s best to use one or more of your own header images.

Customizing the Homepage Header

-Find an image you want to use. If you’re looking for a source of free stock photos, check out SXC.hu. You can sign up for free and download as many stock photos as you want at no cost.

-If the image is larger than 950×200 pixels, before you crop it, it’s useful to shrink the width down to 1000 pixels. You can quickly resize the width of any image with Shrink O’Matic. This free app runs on Adobe Air, so it will work on virtually any OS.

-Crop your image to 950×200 pixels. Although the exact size of this theme’s header is 940×198, you won’t be able to use any image with dimensions smaller than this, so it’s best to give yourself a little spare room.

-Log into WordPress. From the menu on the left side, click “Appearance,” then “Header.” Click “Choose File,” and select the image from your computer.

-Click “Upload.” WordPress will upload the image, and allow you to crop the image to exactly 940×198.

-Take a look at the new header on your homepage!

Customizing a Page or Post Header

Although you probably won’t choose a custom header for every single page and post, a custom header is a great way to accent your best content. When you don’t choose a custom header for a page or post, your homepage header will be displayed by default.

-Follow the steps above for finding and cropping the image you want to use.

-In the editing area of the page or post, click the “Set Featured Image” link under the “Featured Image” section on the right side of the screen.

-Click the “Select Files” button, and choose the image you want to upload.

-After the image is uploaded, scroll down to the bottom of its properties window, and click the “Use as Featured Image” link.

-If you decide that you don’t want to use that image as the header, click the “Remove featured image” link under the “Featured Image” section.