All in One SEO Pack

Automatic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) out of the box for your wordpress blog …

This plugin is streamlined for some best practices for WordPress SEO. While it gives you many options the defaults reflect the settings I recommend using.

How to use it

Here is a list of the most important on-page ranking factors and how they are addressed by this SEO plugin. You might want to visit Options - All in One SEO to tweak the default options.

Titles
The text that you see in your browser’s window bar is the most important thing *on* your page. Make sure your titles are getting rewritten and the important stuff (your post titles) always come before anything else. You can leave a few words from your blog title to do some branding but don’t overdo. If your post titles don’t contain your most precious phrases you want to rank for then tweak them. Leave the post titles as it is but change the meta title.

Descriptions
Once your pages rank in search engines your description (aside of course from your title) makes a potential visitor want to click through, or not. It’s mta descriptions, believed dead by many people, that decide over your site’s fate. If you don’t want to invest the time and write a description for every post at least let them be auto-generated. This vastly better than the usual “Share This … Posted on … under …” description that is often used. The preferred source for your post description is your post excerpt. Use this when you want to tweak your description.

Keywords
All in One SEO Pack can generate them from your categories (this was the old way of tagging your posts in wordpress) or from Ultimate Tag Warrior or, starting with WordPress 2.3, the built-in tagging system. Using your categories is optional, the rest is auto-detected and used if there. WP 2.3.x tags are the preferred keyword source.

Duplicate Content
You can have “noindex” and the like generated for archive-, category- and tag pages if you seem to have trouble with duplicate content.
That was about the 20% of effort needed by you to achieve 80% of results with on-page factors. Of course you also need incoming links, no plugin can do this for you in a safe manner. If anything is unclear, some feature is missing, or you are in supplemental results hell feel free to ask.

Per Post/Page Tweaking

One the post/page editing there is a collapsed area named after the plugin. Open it and you can tweak title, keywords and descriptions. In most cases this is not the recommended way. Descriptions can be auto-generated or taken from the post-excerpt (except for pages, here this GUI is necessary). Keywords should be generated by tags and categories. The title can only be tweaked here, and this is a very powerful way to optimize your posts and pages.

This SEO plugin is designed to give you the best options out of the box, however depending on your situation your mileage may vary, and no set of options is perfect for every site.