All in One SEO Pack plugin overview

All in One SEO Pack plugin Although WordPress is built with robust blogging features and has recently evolved into a content management system (CMS), it lags behind the built-in SEO capabilities such as automatic sitemap, robots.txt editor, etc. Since the nature of a self-hosted WordPress site requires basic ability to edit root files like .htaccess, you need to look for a packaged plugin with all SEO needs. The All in One SEO plugin offers most of the SEO features you need under one roof, and it’s no surprise that it’s one of the most popular plugins in the WordPress repository with over 15 million downloads.

All features of the All in One SEO plugin are divided into three sections:

• General settings
• Performance
• Feature Manager

We will discuss in detail the various features described in each section.

General SEO settings

This section is full of features and we will cover the most essential for all site owners in general.

Canonical URLs

Because www and non-www sites are treated by Google as two different sites, setting up a site-level 301 redirect is necessary to avoid any penalty due to the duplication problem. Enabling “Canonical URL” will set up an automatic redirect for your entire WordPress installation with a single click.

Use original titles

Enable this option if any other plugin on your site is interfering with the title tag generated by the All in One SEO plugin.

Related: Yoast SEO plugin review.

Home page and keyword settings

Set up the title, meta description, and keywords for your homepage in the Homepage Settings section, and enable or disable meta keywords in the Keyword Settings section.

Header settings

If you’re always wondering how people show different types of header separators when displayed on search results pages and browser tabs, then the answer is here.

Check the “Rewrite Headers” option to display the title tag in the format you choose, available under this option. For example, if you can enter “% post_title% <% blog_title%” in “Post Title Format” to separate the post title and blog title with “<” character.

Verification, tracking and authorship by Google

All in One SEO Pack plugin makes it very easy to validate your site with Google and Bing webmaster tools along with Pinterest verification. Just paste the verification code and save your changes to verify your site.

In the same way, you can add the Google Analytics tracking code to your site and connect to Google Analytics.

Another important setting available is to add authorship to your site with a Google+ profile so that the author’s name appears on search results pages.

Noindex and advanced settings

Use these settings to tell search engines not to index the selected taxonomies and to exclude pages from the All in One SEO plugin.

System performance and health

Here you can set performance-related options such as increasing PHP memory limit and runtime, as well as system and plugin status.

Feature Manager

This is a set of additional features that you can enable or disable independently of other settings.

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XML sitemap

This one of the most important features allows you to create an XML sitemap to submit to a search engine. The Sitemap format will be similar to “http://your-site-name.com/sitemap.xml” which you can submit to Google and other search engines. This is a simple sitemap compared to the sitemap index file created in the Yoast SEO plugin. The priority and frequency of change are automatically determined by the plugin. We can also expect a Video Sitemap from All in One SEO coming soon.

Robots.txt

Activating the robots.txt function will activate the additional menu “All in One SEO > Robots.txt”. Here you can view the existing robots.txt file, add additional rules, and optimize for standardization.

File editor

The file editor allows you to edit robots.txt and .htaccess files from the WordPress admin panel. Enabling this feature will also add an additional menu to the sidebar.