WPMU DEV SEO Plugin

Out of the box Wordpress doesn't have much SEO capacity. There's no way to setup custom Meta tags, redirects or anything else to improve your SEO. SEO plugins should at least allow you to create Meta tags (Title, Description and Keywords) for each post or page. That's basically all I do with this plugin, plus use it to handle redirects.

Let me explain how this is helpful for redirects and when you should use them.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about -

My site is for a local business directory. I add new businesses into the directory via blog posts. But I want a page for each category of business like 'health shops', 'fitness centers', 'bicycle parts' etc to appear on the main navigation. So I create blog post categories for each of the above, then I create a page for each category. But instead of putting content onto the page I create a redirect so I can send people to the post category, which then pulls-in all appropriate content. So the 301 redirect would look something like this /category/bicycle-parts/
Now I can include the page bicycle parts on the navigation but the content people receive is actually post content organized by categories. So this is an easy way of getting posts to appear from the main navigation by using the 301 Redirect function of the SEO Plugin.

You can download this plugin here, along with many other useful plugins.

The video above will show you how to configure your plugin.

To configure - From your WP Admin, go to Settings and click 'WPMU DEV SEO'.

On the landing page, we're only going to use one of the features, so check the box next to 'Title and Meta Optimization' and leave the others unchecked. Click on 'Save Settings' then go WP Admin 'Settings' and click on 'Permalinks'. Select the option 'Month and Name' then click 'save changes'. This last step is changing the link structure so if your blog has been in operation for a while you'll need to check that the links still work as they should on the front end. If there's any problems then change the Permalinks setting back to how it was.

Now when you make a Post or Page, you'll see an extra area under the text editor, WPMU DEV SEO. Clicking on this will give you the boxes to enter your custom page titles, descriptions and keywords meta tags. These are important settings for SEO so try to use your keywords so long as they actually appear on the page/post and don't repeat them too often (1 repeat is generally OK, but mix it up a little).

CH

Quote this article on your site