WordPress SEO plugins can make a valuable contribution to good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) but they are not a magical solution. If you get the basics of SEO wrong then installing lots of WordPress SEO Plugins will do nothing to improve your search engine ranking. The most important tip for anyone wanting to get high search engine rankings for their website is that the critical time is before you start setting up your site:
You must undertake through keyword research. It is important to find keywords which have a reasonable search volume but not too much competition. Pages and posts can then be built around these keywords. If you pick highly competitive keywords, dominated by established sites with lots of backlinks, then achieving a high ranking may be impossible unless you have lots of time and money.
Your domain name is an important factor in SEO and you should aim to get a name with the primary keyword near the beginning.
Once your WordPress site is live you should address the following before thinking about WordPress SEO Plugins:
You need a theme designed for SEO as well as for appearance.
You should configure the Permalinks to “Postname” so that the page/post title appears in the URL.
You should create legal pages (Terms, Privacy Policy etc.) and standard pages (Contact, About) and link to them in the header or footer (search engines like to see these).
At this point it is appropriate to think about WordPress SEO Plugins:
A good starting point is to install a general SEO Plugin like “All In One SEO Pack”. This has a number of useful functions, which you can adjust, but it is quite satisfactory to start with the default configuration. To complete the installation all you have to do is compete the meta data for the home page.
Of the other WordPress SEO Plugins there is one other type that you should install immediately. This is one to create a sitemap for the search engines. This will help the search engines find all your content and speed up indexing.
