If you have WordPress installed but not an SEO plugin, then you are seriously hurting your chances of success in search engine listings. The default settings in WordPress simply don’t give you enough control. Currently, the best plugin to use is the free one from Yoast.
Once you have installed the plugin, go through each of the tabs and adjust the settings to your liking.
But before you do that, go to the Settings option and change your permalink structure. I prefer the post name option, but if you have a very large and busy site, you can choose one of the other options.
Then go to Yoast SEO settings.
The General tab allows you to easily link your website with the webmaster tools provided by Google and Bing and also allows you to claim your site on Alexa without having to upload a file to their server.
Once you’ve done that, you need to move on to the Titles and Metas section.
This is where the real SEO magic happens!
Yoast allows you to force a rewrite of your page and post titles. If the plugin thinks this is necessary for your chosen theme it will check the box automatically, but if you find that some of your page title settings are being ignored then it’s worth checking this box.
What it does is make sure that the title displayed in the browser tab and (more importantly) in the search results is what you think it is.
Yoast will give you a preview of your title and will also tell you when you’ve used too many characters, which would mean Google would truncate it with ellipses.
This isn’t an entirely precise science because Google now takes into account the width of the characters in your title, so it pays to err on the side of caution and use a few fewer than the plugin suggests.
There are several other settings on the general tab where you can remove certain types of pages (such as archive pages) from being indexed and potentially causing duplicate content issues on your site.
The post types tab is also important.
WordPress normally includes the post date before the meta description (the text that is displayed below the page title in search results), but the plugin does not allow this by default in its preview. Instead, you need to check the appropriate box on the post types page for the date to display in the preview.
Personally, I had missed doing this on my blog until recently, which meant Google cut off a lot of my page meta descriptions. Once you’ve checked the box, and you only need to do so for the posts option, the preview and the suggested number of characters in the description will again be accurate.
There is also an option to change the default look of post and page titles. So if, like me, you don’t want your site name in the title, you can remove it from the defaults, which saves you from forgetting to do it on each individual post.
The other main setting you should pay attention to is the one that allows you to link your Facebook, Twitter and Google+ profiles and make sure they are coordinated and appear how you would like them to.