How to Setup All in One SEO for WordPress Correctly (Ultimate Guide)

Key Takeaways

In this video, I'll walk you through how to install and set up All-One SEO for your WordPress website, and we'll cover step by step so you can get up and running quickly. To get started, the first thing we need to do is we want to install All-in-One SEO plugin. You can start with the free version by going to plugins, add new, and you can search for All-in-One SEO plugin. To show you everything that the plugin can do, I'm going to install the pro version. So, if you are ready to install the pro version, you can go to aio seo.com and make sure you use promo code wpb vip and you'll get the best discount on all SEO. So, once you create your account, then you can log in. And from here, we can go to downloads. So, we can download the plugin. While we're here, we also want to copy the license key. Great. Now that we have everything, we can head back over. And since we're not installing it from WordPress.org, we're going to click upload instead. Click choose file and click install now. Can also close this out. Once it's installed, you also want to activate the plugin as well. Great. Once it's activated, we'll see this wizard set up. So, we can get started. And then what's great about it is it'll ask you a few questions and it'll turn on or recommend certain items depending on what you say. So, for this particular setup, I'm going to say that this is a blog. And under home title, this is how you can set it up. What it will do automatically is it brings in your site title, meaning your site name. When you set up WordPress, you set up a name. It'll bring that in a separator and then the tagline. Down here, you also want to set up the meta description for your actual website. Maybe what is your site about? And we can click save and continue. Great. From here, we can add some additional information. You can also upload your image for your logo. And you can also set up all of your social profiles. If you want to try and speed things up, you can say use the username for this for multiple networks. And then what is your username? For instance, many of ours is WP beginner. So now we can click save and continue. Great. On this screen, you'll be asked what type of features, SEO features do you want to turn on. And by default, sitemaps and optimize search appearance will be on by default. You can also do analytics. They're recommending Monster Insights. I'll show you a little bit of what that looks like later. It is another great plugin that connects Google Analytics with your WordPress dashboard. And then they're also recommending image SEO, which is for pro or higher. Now, if you're a local business or if you rely heavily on video for your website or if you rely on adding your news to Google News, then those are some features that you would want to turn on as well. And now this section is just asking, is your site under construction or is it already live? If you already have your site, it's been indexed by Google, it's out there with Google, then you'll want to keep it live. If this is a new brand new website and you're still working on it, you can say it's under construction. For this, I'm going to keep it as live, but if you ever have it under construction, I'll show you in a minute how you can take it back into live mode as well. And then here, you can choose all the post types. And you want to enable a sitemap. We'll cover that in a minute. And then it's asking, do you want to do you have multiple authors or will it be just you? So, if it's just you, just say no, it's just you. Here, it's asking, do you want to redirect attachment pages? You'll always want to say yes to that. And I will show you why. By default, WordPress once you upload any type of image or a document like a PDF or a video, then it's added to your media library. This is our media library, and these are all of the images associated with this website. And if I open up this image in its own page, you see that it's actually an attachment page. So, it's by default, WordPress creates these attachment pages for absolutely every image. And the issue with that is that if you have several of these that are being indexed by Google and they show up in the search results, well, they're not very meaningful and they're not helpful for the user, they're not helpful for your site. And so, it can actually reduce your search engine rankings. And so, you don't want to have hundreds or thousands of these going on. So, you always want to redirect attachment pages. Now from here if you have signed up for the pro or higher then you'll want to paste your license key and click connect. Great. Now everything is done and we can move on. You can either read the documentation. Let's go ahead and click finish setup and go to dashboard. Optimizing your posts and pages should be an ongoing thing for you. So let's show you how you can do it with a post. So I'm going to go to all posts and we've set this one up. So I'm going to edit this one. When we scroll all the way down you see the all-inone SEO settings under general. You see the snippet preview. This is what it will look like. And then we can make the changes down here. So, it's pulling in the post title as the separator. This is the separator and then the site title. If you need to change things up, you can either remove some of these smart tags if you want. And then down here, you can choose a post excerpt or you can physically write in your own if you want. From here, we want to add a focus keyphrase. So, I've copied that item and this is what I want. So, let's add that in there. And it will go through and do an update on how it thinks you're doing. As you see, it wants us to also put that title, that focus keyphrase into the meta description, into the introduction. The phrase might be too long, so we might want to make it shorter. And then it'll give you a page analysis, some basic scores that you'll want to look at. So, if I click on errors, those are the items that it told us to do if you want to go through and update that. You can also look at the readability and it gives you some suggestions on how to improve the readability as well as the title information for every blog post that you have. You want to go through this process and make sure that all of this looks good for search engines. And then you can click on the social tab to make sure that the social tab for sharing it with Facebook and Twitter looks good. This gives you a preview of what it will look like. You can do the same thing for Twitter as well. And then there's a schema tag which we'll talk about in a minute. So once I do that, I'm going to simply update this. And then we want to take a look at the true score. So the true score, that is the score that it's giving us, the true SEO score, how we're ranking this blog post, and it gives us some ideas on how we can fix that. You can also look at the readability gives you some ideas on how to fix that as well. So I make some minor changes just to see if I can improve my score. Okay, so I went through there and I did a few updates and now I've been able to raise up my score to 94, which is pretty respectable. A lot of times I say don't try and get too crazy on getting the 100, but if you can get into the green, then that's really good for your SEO. The next thing we want to look at is the all-in-one SEO XML sitemap. So if you go over on the left, all-in-one SEO, and we go to sitemaps, this is a critical part of SEO with Google search results. An XML sitemap is a file that lists all of your website content in an XML format. And so that search engines like Google, they'll be able to easily discover all of your posts and all of your content so that they can index your content in their search results. So you see by default we have it enabled. We can actually open it up in a new window. So you can see what this looks like and what SEO does. You can always find it by going to your website/sitemap.xml. So they have it distinguished between posts, those are your blog pages. If you have pages, then you have a specific site map for that. And then if you have categories, like your categories and tags, you'll have a site map for that. Now, if you have other things on your site, like if you're a news website or if you have a WooCommerce store or some kind of store, then it'll have its own site map here. Same thing with video. If you have video on your site, then you can turn on site maps for that. So once you click on this, this will show all of the posts that you have on your website. You can see the priority that it sets, the last change, and the change frequency. You can see that it is generated by All-in-One SEO, and that it is meant to be consumed by search engines like Google or Bing. So going back, you see down here, we have the additional pages area. So if you have something like a Shopify page that you want to add manually, you can add them here. Scrolling back up, we'll see a look at a couple of different other site maps. So, for instance, if video is important for you, you can enable video sitemap for your website. That's if you're uploading videos to YouTube, but you're embedding them on your site, you can activate that here. Same thing with news sitemap. If you are submitting a lot of if your website is a news site and you're submitting it to Google News, then you'll want to enable that site map. And then the same thing with RSS sitemap. This is pretty important because the main XML sitemap Google sees, but by and large, most search engines will frequently go to the RSS sitemap because the RSS sitemap only shows the more recent updates of your website. Okay, next, let's take a look at schema markup in All-in-One SEO. And schema markup is just a special vocabulary that you can use in your content in the HTML code to tell search engines more about what your content is. It's called like micro data to display rich snippets. For instance, if I'm looking for a best apple pie recipe, then I see all of these items like the ratings and the votes and how long and calories. This is all schema markup that these websites have added to their site so Google knows what it is so that Google can more easily showcase this information on the search results. So, let's take a look at schema for our site. We'll go back to our WordPress dashboard and on the left for all-in-one SEO, let's go to search appearance. And this is also where the global settings are. But for this, we want to click on content types. And from here, we can do schema markup. From here, you can choose what type of schema that you want all of them to be. By and large, it'll be articles. If you're a product store, if you're an e-commerce store, you could choose products, but we're going to do article. And what type of article? There's three different types. You can do article, blog post or news article. Since this is a blog, we're going to keep it on blog. And then the cool thing is once you go into each one. So if you have a blog and then you also have products, then you can change them individually. So for instance, this is we can go in and edit. We can also go on schema right here. And if you wanted to change each individual one, then you can change that here. For instance, say this is a recipe. We'll change that here. And this is where you can fill out all the recipe information. dish type, the cuisine, the time required, cooking time, all of that. Once you fill all that information in, when it is shown up in Google, they'll decide if they show this for your blog post or for your recipe. Now, you'll want to also connect Google Search Console or other web master tools with your website, and All-in-One SEO makes that really easy to do as well. You can go to all-in-one SEO tab on the left and we'll go to general settings and under web master tools, you can simply click on which one you want to verify. Say with Google verification code, they'll give you a code. Simply add that in here and then it'll connect your site with Google search console. Now, if you are a local business, then something that you'll want to do is you'll want to go through and set up Google My Business. So, if you're looking for a local hardware store or something like that, you are the results that come back. This is connecting your business with Google My Business. And then you can come back to your website, go to online SEO under local SEO. It'll be an upgrade that you'll want to do with Pro, but it makes it super easy for you to set up your business name, payment information, you can show your opening hours, and all of that data will tie over to your local business account. And if we go back to our all-in-one SEO dashboard, we can scroll down and we can see our SEO site score. This gives you an idea of how your website is doing. This is different than the true SEO score. This is actually looking at your overall website. And let's go ahead and click on complete the site audit check checklist to see more results on it. So, it gives us an overall score. Very good scores between 60 and 80, which is awesome. you want to strive to get above 70. And then scrolling down, it gives you different items that you really want to work on, whether it's critical issues, if you want to focus on the critical issues, then recommended improvements, things that then you'll want to work on. And then don't forget to take a look at the good results. Don't forget to take a look at the things that you're doing well, so you can keep on doing those things. Well, the other cool thing is you can actually analyze a competitor. So you can put in the competitor's website address and then it'll generate an SEO analysis report of your competitor where you can get a detailed report on the different SEO checks, their top keywords, some critical issues, performance, and things like that so that you can see how they're doing and see how can you improve your website. If you are already using a different SEO plugin, you go under tools, then all SEO has a great import export feature. So you can export the features from say Yost SEO plugin and you can import that here. The other cool thing under tools is if you ever need to edit your robots.txt editor or if you need to edit your ht.ht access then you can quickly edit them here. So you don't have to jump out and go into your hosting providers c panel. Now RSS feeds are really cool, but the problem with them are a lot of times content aggregators. They will use it and they'll try and pass off your content as theirs by just importing all of your information. So what you can do under general settings RSS content is you can add a little bit of information before your content. So you can do a post link and that post link comes back to your site so that you at least get credit. You can also say first shown on and say your site name. So this would be in the template. So every time that stuff comes over, you're getting your backlink and you're getting links to your site. So people can click on it and they know that you're the original author of this information. And then one final cool feature is access control. So if you have a bunch of people working on your site, you can choose who can see what and who can make changes by setting up these different access control settings here. And now I told you in the beginning if you set this up and you had said that this is under construction and now say you're ready to take your site live. Let's go over to settings and you want to go to reading then the search engine visibility. Take that uncheck that it should be unchecked. And now search engines can start indexing your site. And you want to make sure that you save changes. And another cool feature is once you've done all of this you'll want to install something like Monster Insights. With Monster Insights, you can connect your Google Analytics with your website so you know exactly where your visitors are coming from, how many page views, how many visitors are coming to your website so that you can increase the conversions on it. You also see your top countries, top referers, your top pages, and so much more. To get started, you can head over to monsterinsights.com and make sure you use promo code WPB VIP so you'll get the best discount on Monster Insights. And now, make sure you watch this video next as I walk you through exactly what SEO is and how to improve it for your website.