Wordpress is simple, minimalistic and yet extremely powerful. However, being easy-to-use, the engine has also some huge disadvantages - e.g. “naked” Wordpress is very inefficient when it comes to SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Reason: there is simply too much to tweak, too many plugins to use and too many details to take care of.

Title, Meta-Description and Keywords determine the way your posts are shown in search engines, and thus how appealing they appear for random users. The better description your weblog provides, the better idea users will have about the content of your post, which results in the amount of your page impressions. Furthermore, if your Wordpress automatically generates several URLs for a single post (date, id, title of the article), you might run into serious problems with search engines. In fact, sites with the so-called Duplicate Content are often penalized and can be excluded from the search index for several months.

Therefore it’s extremely important to have a profound understanding of what can and should be done to avoid penalization and ensure optimal presentation in search engine results. Popular Wordpress Plugins Optimal Title and Head META Description offer help, but their possibilities are limited.

So if you’d like to have a more comprehensive solution, you should consider the not-so-well-known wpSEO-plugin, which is an effective Wordpress-plugin which can help you to achieve optimal results in search engines. The plugin comes from Germany, was written by Sergej Müller and has been recently released in Version 2.0. So, what can you do with wpSEO?

wpSEO: More SEO For Wordpress

The Meta-Description is used by Google and other search engines to provide the description of a page. This is quite important - particularly since Wordpress by default does absolutely nothing about it. wpSEO can generate post descriptions in a variety of ways, however in most cases it makes sense to cite the actual postings - automatically. If you’d like to be more precise, you can also provide a brief summary for Meta-Description manually.

The definition of used Meta-Keywords offers you more flexibility. If you are already using the plugins UT’W or STP, wpSEO can use your tags as keywords. Otherwise the keywords will be automatically generated from the article, which is not always a sound solution for efficient SEO. By default wpSEO generates keywords fully automatically, however you can let it extract text passages marked in bold or italics or in <span>-tags. You can also use filters to ensure that only relevant data is being used (see screenshot below).

Optimizing <title>-Tags is neither time-consuming nor difficult - in fact, it’s rather simple and comfortable. You can use keywords, a separator, category names or the blog title. wpSEO takes care of Duplicate Content (e.g. tag-pages) by using the NOFOLLOW Meta-Tag. It also marks content sections for Google AdSense (google_ad_section) which might be useful as well.

To install the plugin, it’s enough to upload it to the plugins directory (wp-content/plugins) and activate it in the Wordpress engine. You should avoid using two or more plugins (as mentioned before) at the same time. Previously installed plugins can cause conflicts, just like manual entries in your header.php file. To make sure the wpSEO is working properly, you should at least deactivate similar tools; better - delete them.

A last useful feature you might never use, but would be happy to have available once you need it: you may export all your settings as an XML-file and use them for another blogs. Therefore it’s very easy to maintain the optimal configuration and adjust it to a number of blogs.

At the moment wpSEO doesn’t provide a documentation in English - Sergej is still looking for a translator. However, you can be sure that you won’t really need a step-by-step-tutorial. wpSEO is free, simple and self-explanatory.

Summary

• It’s important to have a profound understanding of what can and should be done to avoid penalization and achieve the optimal click rate in search engine results.
• Title, meta-description and keywords determine the way your posts are shown in search engines, and thus how appealing they appear in search results.
• Compared to Optimal Title and Head META Description, wpSEO is a simple and more comprehensive solution you can use to take care of SEO optimization.