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Joost De valk, a known name in the SEO, developers and online marketing community, recently released an upgrade of his popular plugin, WordPress SEO. While many webmasters had been(and still do) using the All In One SEO Pack (AIOSEO) to answer all their on-page SEO needs, this plugin has some features that cut out the need for using additional plugins along with AIOSEO.

How To Get the WordPress SEO Plugin

You can download and install the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin from here and then upload it to your WordPress site, or you can directly install it from your WordPress site by going to Plugins->Add New->Wordpress SEO by Yoast. The first link you will see will be of this plugin.

 How To Configure WordPress SEO plugin

Once you have installed and activated the WordPress SEO plugin, you will notice these additions to your Dashboard. The main configuration panel will appear at the bottom of the sidebar, while a shortcut will appear in the main menu, which has almost the same options, plus additional options for keyword research from Adwords External, Google Insights and SEO Book.

Now that you have been familiarized with this plugin, its about time we get into the nitty-gritties of setting it up and turbo-charging our SEO.

1. Dashboard

 The main dashboard of the WordPress SEO plugin provides the following options:

• If you messed up on some settings, you can always go back to the default setting by clicking on “Reset Default Settings”.

• The advanced part of the plugin (to be discussed later) helps to redirect a post, no-index it, and similar related stuff, and unchecking this option here allows you to do that, especially if you dont want yourself to be related to that content or dont trust the authors. Keep it checked if you have a single-author site.

• The bottom three options are used to verify your site with WMT of Google and Bing, and also verify your site with Alexa.

2. Titles And Meta

This is one of the most important areas where you can make or break your website. It has a few parts, which are explained here.

2.1 General

• Force re-write titles helps you to change the layout of titles according to the variables you chose in the “Post Types”,”Home”,”Taxonomies” and “Other” tabs.

• Site-wide meta settings help you to change the meta settings across the entire site. While checking option 1 makes sure that Google does not index any further sub-pages of your archives, checking 3 and 4 is described pretty well in the image itself.

• Checking option 2 is not recommended, as far as Google is concerned, because of the following reason:

Video: Does Google Use meta Keywords?

• The cleaning up of head section is necessary, and checking the options which hide real simple discovery links (RSD- an XML format and a publishing convention for making services exposed by blog, or other web software, discoverable by client software), WLW Manifest links (Windows Live Writer, hide if you dont use it) and shortlinks for posts (but you get them in the posts area). Hiding RSS link is again optional. Read More On next page