In my last post in this series about optimizing your WordPress Blogs for the search engines I discussed an essential SEO plugin for WordPress called the All-In-One-SEO-Pack.  In that post I discussed a common WordPress issue and talked briefly about how this plugin can help rid your blogs of that problem and optimize them for ranking well in the search engines. In this installment, I would like to demonstrate how to verify that the ‘All In One SEO Pack’ plugin is working correctly on YOUR blog and point out one of the most common problems that new WordPress bloggers encounter when using this plugin.

One common pitfall among new WordPress publishers is that WordPress is so easy to use that it separates the developer from the actual code ‘behind the scenes’ upon which WordPress is built.  This is nice if you are like me and want to avoid the more technical workings of your blog, but it leads to a sense of complacency that can cause us to become lazy when it comes to checking and verifying that modifications we make to our blogs are actually working.  How many of you - after installing a new plugin - actually check to verify that it does what it is intended to do?  I know I am guilty of just uploading any new plugin to the plugins directory, activating it through the admin panel and then moving on to other tasks.

If I had stopped at this point after installing the All In One SEO Pack on this blog, I would have never noticed the common (and easily fixable) problem that I encountered with this plugin shortly after activating it.  Before we get to this issue, let’s first review what this plugin is supposed to do.  Namely, it allows the developer to create unique META tags, including keyword and description tags, on each post page of your WordPress blog.  Something that is essential for optimizing your weblog.

To verify that the All In One SEO Pack plugin is working properly, you should see something similar to the following in your post’s HEAD section after installing this plugin and creating your first post using it:

<!-- all in one seo pack 1.4.6.6 [243,361] –>
<meta name=”description” content=”Learn how to optimize your WordPress posts for the search engines. Create unique META tags, including keywords and descriptions using the all in one seo pack plugin for WordPress.” />
<meta name=”keywords” content=”optimizing wordpress blog, all in one seo pack, installing all in one seo pack for wordpress, creating unique meta tags for wordpress posts, using the all in one seo pack plugin, optimizing your wordpress blog for search engines, wordpress seo” />
<!– /all in one seo pack –>

When I installed and used the SEO pack plugin for the first time, I did NOT see these META tags.  I checked some other blogs out there and did a ‘View Source’ on some of their unique pages and saw code similar to what you see above.  Something was wrong with my install and if I had never checked to verify that the All In One SEO Pack plugin was working properly, I never would have noticed this and I would have missed one of the essential steps for optimizing my WordPress blog for the search engines.

I had to discover what was wrong and see if there was a way to fix it.  I did some related searches and found a simple fix that allowed me to use the all in one SEO pack with my custom WordPress theme.  I will discuss this simple fix in my next post in this series, but for now I urge all of you WordPress bloggers - and maybe even some of you more seasoned veterans, especially those of you who *think* you installed the all in one seo pack, to do the following to verify that the plugin is working properly on your website:

Step 1) Go to any of your individual posts (not category or archives pages)

Step 2) Right-click on the page anywhere and select ‘View Source’

Step 3) VERIFY that you see code in the HEAD section of EACH of your post pages similar to the code example above

STEP 4) If you see the code then relax your SEO plugin is working correctly, otherwise read my next post on getting the all in one SEO pack plugin to work with your custom WordPress theme now!

 Anyway, thanks for reading and please subscribe to my RSS feed by clicking the small grey Feedburner chicklet to the right.  See ya soon.  Madman out!