Carrying out proper SEO is a really long and exhausting journey. You have to take care of all your posts and use the right keywords, make sure the titles are consistent and SEO friendly and a host of other things. Most WordPress users wouldn’t bother taking all that trouble, because it is really tedious. They would rather spend their time writing content for their blog.

The open nature of WordPress means that you find plugins by the bucket for every conceivable administrative task. This is equally true for your search engine optimization techniques too. Having installed and tried several SEO plugins, I have found the SEO plugin to be really good. It gives you the results very quickly. More importantly, it gives you tight control over your SEO and has an intuitive interface to work with.

Installing Ultimate SEO Plugin
You can download the plugin from the official WordPress website here. There is also a way to install the plugin automatically.

• Just visit the plugin homepage. You will find the auto installer box to the right of the page.
• Enter your WordPress blog’s URL and click on “Launch Installer.”
• Click the “Install Now” button and activate it.
• That’s it! You are done.

To access the plugin find the Ultimate SEO panel on the dashboard of your blog. Clicking on the button will bring down a variety of options, all of which will bring up a panel with relevant options. Let us now run through all of these and see how rich this plugin is in its features.

Canonicalizer
URL canonization is very important if you want search engines not to downgrade your website. A problem with many blogs is that a tag on the page redirects to the same page. Now this is not duplicated content. However, technically, since both links are different, but have the same content, search engines consider it as duplicate content. The algorithms suspect that you are trying to game them to get your rankings higher.

The Canonicalizer helps you solve this problem with two options:

• Generate tags.
• Redirect requests for nonexistent pagination.

Tick both these options and you will have solved the problem of URL canonization.

Code Inserter
This feature allows you to enter specific code to your blog very easily. Just copy the code and paste it where relevant. This is especially useful for codes that you use repeatedly such as Google Analytics code that you want to insert into each and every blog post that you publish. It saves a lot of time for you. Here are the places where you can paste code on your post.

• Tag
• Before Item Content
• After Item Content
• Footer

Comp Researcher
When you operate a blog in any niche, there is definitely competition. While you want to grow your readership, it is important that you keep an eye on the competition. The Comp researcher feature does just that by allowing you to know, how other blogs are performing with the keywords you have employed. You can choose any one of the following research tools before entering the keywords.

• Normal Search
• Phrase Match
• Allinanchor
• Allintitle
• Allintext
• Allinurl
• Site
• Inbound Links
• Outbound Links

This particular feature is unique to WordPress Ultimate SEO and proves to be really handy.

Deeplink Juggernaut
Of all the features offered by this plugin, Deeplink juggernaut is the most timesaving one. As you would know, internal links are an important part of SEO, since they show how well organized your website is. Using this feature, you just need to enter the keyword terms and the URL in the given field. Now, whenever you use the keyword anywhere, it will automatically create a URL that matches the one you entered.

Doing this manually would take a few collective hours off your week. The Deeplink juggernaut saves those hours for you. You can change the content links settings in the tab with the same name. The feature gives you a neat list of the keywords and associated URLS, so that you can change them when you want.

File Editor
The file editor is a trivial option that comes with WordPress Ultimate SEO plugin. It allows you to edit some of your files such as the robots.txt or .htaccess. It is easier than editing your files this way rather than using FTP to get access to them. Not everybody needs to use this option though.

Internal Relevance Researcher
This tool will help you to search for your posts on Google search results. You probably won’t use this option too much. However, it is handy if you want to know how your results look on search result pages.

Link Box Inserter
This is a useful option that allows you to insert links to a page on your blog anywhere you want on your site. This could be at the end of a post or a page. Actually, you can choose in what position you want the link to be inserted. This helps you, when want to share somebody’s post or other people want to share your posts. You can set options for each page as follows:

• Display linkboxes… – 1. At the end of posts 2. At the end of pages 3. When called by the su_linkbox hook
• Link Box HTML: Here is where you insert the code for the link

Meta Editor
This is an important feature, and it should be used properly by all users of the plugin. Here you will add information about your blog posts, which will not be visible to visitors. However, the info is very important for proper organization and search engines. You can enter a variety of date as well as verification codes from Bing, Yahoo and Google. Here are the pieces of information you can enter in the given fields.

• Blog Homepage Meta Description: Describe Your Blog site in short
• Blog Homepage Meta Keywords: Add keywords related to your blog. Make sure you don’t enter keywords that are in no way related to your blog.
• Default Values: This option allows you to “Use the blog’s tagline as the default homepage description.”
• Spider Instructions: This allows you to control which parts of your sites are indexed by the search engines.
• Verification Codes: Enter codes provided by the three major search engines mentioned above.

More Link Customizer
As the name suggests, this allows you to customize the links on your homepage so that they don’t display the whole post. Here are the options that you can tweak using this feature:

• Title Tag
• Meta Description
• Meta Keywords
• Meta Robots Tag
• More Link Text

No Index Manager
This feature avoids duplicate content from being indexed by search engines. It helps saves your rankings from going down due to replicated content.

Sharing Facilitator
This is for all your social media sharing. It allows you to add buttons from various social networking and social bookmarking sites. You can choose whether you Share or Add buttons at the end of the blog posts.

Slug Optimizer
This feature cleans up your URL automatically and makes it easier to read. For example, if the URL consists of words such as ‘of’, ‘for’, ‘in’, the slug optimizer will remove those words. This is because these words are not needed to guess the content of the post.

Title Tag Rewriter
Using this feature, you can rewrite title tags, of various site elements such as pages, posts in one place. This helps you to avoid digging into the WordPress code and is a big time saver.

Conclusion
As you can see here, the WordPress Ultimate SEO plugin offers a bevy of features – some big and others small. If you want a complete SEO solution for your WordPress site, this plugin is all you need to install on your blog. If you configure all the options correctly, you may see your search engine rankings rising quickly.

==== About the Author ====
Crystal J. Briscoe writes for Exams Key. It provides comprehensive and cost effective IT certifications exams preparation material. Let’s take benefit of Exams key ITIL Certification Preparation training material and clear your IT certification on first try. Check out today.