This is the second article about the essential steps you - as a new WordPress blogger - should take in order to prepare your WordPress weblog to be ranked competitively in the search engines.  In Part 1 of this series, we looked at creating search engine friendly URLs and now it is time to begin to investigate how we can optimize our individual WordPress posts so that each post is optimized properly.

WordPress, as powerful as it is, does NOT come ’search engine optimized’ right out of the box.  Anyone who is new to blogging or to search engine marketing in general may not realize that simply using WordPress with all of its default settings intact and without any essential modifications is simply not going to get your WordPress blog to the top of the search engines.  Perhaps this is why so many new bloggers trying to become internet entrepreneurs fail; not from lack of trying, but from lack of some basic knowledge.

WordPress blogs are built from template.php files.  There is one template file for the header section ‘header.php’, one for the sidebar(s), ’sidebar.php’, and so on.  This is nice and convenient because this leads to the uniform look of your website.  It is also convenient because once you have advertising on your WordPress blog, you only need to place an advertisers banner or button ad in your ’sidebar.php’ page, for example and it will appear on all the pages of your blog.  The reason is because the page ’sidebar.php’ is INCLUDED in each of your blog’s instances.  The same goes for ‘header.php’.

Now, while this is convenient when placing ads on your blog and essential for maintaining a consistent ‘look’ across all of your pages, it is VERY BAD for search engine optimization (SEO).  Let’s take a look at why this can cause your site difficulty.  Suppose you want to create targeted META tags for each of the pages or posts on your site (which is mandatory), but you decide to put your META description and keywords tags in your ‘header.php’ - what would happen?  That’s right! Since each page contains your ‘header.php’ you would get the SAME description and keywords tags on each page.

Suppose you try to put your META tags into each post (like in this post, for example).  Well what would happen here is that the content of each post in your WordPress blog is contained in the BODY of your page, NOT in the HEAD section where the search engine spiders are looking for your META tags!  Seems like quite a dliemma, doesn’t it?  How is it possible to get your META tags in the HEAD section of each of your posts, while simultaneously keeping your META tags OUT of your ‘header.php’ file so that they are UNIQUE to each of your pages?  WordPress plugin 1.4.6.6, the all in one seo pack to the rescue!

This plugin is the first and most essential plugin that you need to add to your WordPress blog to optimize your pages properly for the major search engines.  So let’s talk about where to get this plugin and how to install the WordPress All-In-One-SEO-Pack.

Step 1) Get the WordPress All In One SEO Plugin here.  All you need to do is visit the aformentioned link to the official WordPress site and click the ‘Download’ link.  This will Download the zipped plugin files to your hardrive.

Step 2) Extract the zip files using WinZip or some other zip utility.

Step 3) Use your FTP utility to transfer the unzipped files to the following folder on your web server: /wp-content/plugins/ Once the plugin files are in the ‘plugins’ folder WordPress will be able to recognize this plugin.

Step 4) Activate the all in one seo pack plugin.  Do this by logging in to your WordPress admin panel, click ‘Plugins’ along the top menu bar and click ‘Activate’ to activate the All-In-One-SEO-Pack plugin.

You have now installed and activated the All-In-One-SEO-Pack WordPress plugin.  In the next installment of this series of posts we’ll discuss how to verify that this plugin is working properly, what to do if it is not and how to use this plug-in to optimize each of your WordPress posts for the search engines.