Meta SEO Pack 2.0 Readme

Fine tune your WordPress for SEO: rewrite title, add meta tags, canonical links and more. Out-of-the-box settings are a good starting point for blogs.

Plugin Homepage: Meta SEO Pack

Plugin Homepage on WordPress.org: Meta SEO Pack

Author Homepage: Poradnik Webmastera

Author: Daniel Frużyński

Description

One of the biggest sources of traffic for your blog are Search Engines - mainly Google, Yahoo! and Bing (formerly MSN). Therefore it is crucial to optimize WordPress to make it SEO-friendly. Many things are already done in WordPress itself, but still there is a room for many improvements.

If you care about Search Engines and your position in search results, you should install this plugin. If you are a beginner, default settings will be good for you. If you are an advanced user, you have many options to fine-tune your blog.

Some of the plugin features are:

• Rewrite <title> tag to get most of it;
• Add Meta Keywords, Meta Description and Meta Robots tags to all blog pages;
• Use entered tags and descriptions for Meta Keywords and Meta Description tags, or generate them from content;
• Prevent Search Engines from indexing archive pages and feeds, in order to avoid Duplicate Content problem;
• Prevent Search Engines from using descriptions entered in DMOZ (ODP) or Yahoo! Directory as description for page;
• Add <link rel="canonical"> to specify preferred URL for each page;
• Add rel="nofollow" to links in various places;
• Good default configuration for beginners and a lot of configuration options for advanced users (look for new 'Meta SEO Pack' menu);
• Custom filters - other plugins can integrate itself with Meta SEO Pack;

Available translations:

• English
• Polish (pl_PL) - done by me

Installation

1. Upload meta-seo-pack directory to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
2. Activate the plugin through the 'Plugins' menu in WordPress
3. Go to the 'Meta SEO Pack' menu and configure it if you want (you can also leave default configuration as-is if you are a beginner)
4. Enjoy :)

Frequently Asked Questions

How Meta SEO Pack rewrites title tag?

Meta SEO Pack uses following title formats as a base for title of different pages (configurable):

• Home Page: %blog_name%
• Posts: %title% | %categories% | %blog_name%
• Pages: %title% | %blog_name%
• Attachments: %title% | %categories% | %blog_name%
• Categories: %categories% | Categories | %blog_name%
• Tags: %tag% | Tags | %blog_name%
• Custom Taxonomies: %tax_name% | %tax_label% | %blog_name%
• Archive for Day/Month/Year: Archive for %date% | %blog_name%
• Author Posts: %author_name% | Authors | %blog_name%
• Search Results: Search results for %search% | %blog_name%

There are also extra rewriting rules for subsequent pages of archives, posts, pages and comments. This way you will avoid duplicate title problems (reported in Google Webmasters Tools):

• Subpages for multipage Archives/Posts/Pages: %desc% - Page %n%
• Subpages for multipage comments: %desc% - Comments Page %n%

How Meta SEO Pack generates value for meta keywords tag?

All pages uses configured Default keywords as value for meta keywords tag. Some of the pages also adds some extra keywords (configurable):

• Home Page: no extra keywords
• Posts: tags, categories
• Pages: no extra keywords
• Attachments: no extra keywords
• Categories: category name and all parents
• Tags: tag name
• Custom Taxonomies: taxonomy name and taxonomy term name
• Archive for Day/Month/Year: no extra keywords
• Author Posts: author name
• Search Results: search term

Plugin does not add extra keywords for subpages.

How Meta SEO Pack generates value for meta description tag?

Meta SEO Pack either uses entered description, excerpt or generate it from content. This depends on page (configurable):

• Home Page: special description (by default it is set to %blog_name% - %blog_desc%)
• Posts: either use excerpt (if entered) or generate from post content (initial part)
• Pages: generate from page content (initial part)
• Attachments: attachment description
• Categories: use category description
• Tags: use tag description
• Custom Taxonomies: taxonomy term description
• Archive for Day/Month/Year: description is not added (yet)
• Author Posts: description is not added (yet)
• Search Results: description is not added (yet)

Description is also additionally changed for subsequent pages of archives, posts, pages and comments. This way you will avoid duplicate description problems (reported in Google Webmasters Tools):

• Subpages for multipage Archives/Posts/Pages: %description% - page %n%
• Subpages for multipage comments: %description% - comments page %n%

How Meta SEO Pack generates value for meta robots tag?

Meta SEO Pack adds noindex,follow as a value of meta robots for pages, in order to avoid Duplicate Content problem. follow is added to make sure you will keep link juice of links leading to noindexed pages. Here is the list of pages which can be noindexed (configurable):

• Home Page: subpages only
• Posts: comment subpages only
• Pages: no
• Attachments: yes
• Categories: yes
• Tags: yes
• Custom Taxonomies: yes
• Archive for Day/Month/Year: yes
• Author Posts: yes
• Search Results: yes

Meta SEO Pack can also add noodp and noydir, in order to prevent Search Engines from using descriptions entered in DMOZ (ODP) or Yahoo! Directory as description for page.

You can also noindex your feeds - Meta SEO Pack can both add meta robots tag to feeds and send X-Robots-Tag HTTP Header.

How to remove footer added by Meta SEO Pack?

This plugin is provided for free, so this footer is the only way I can get credit from happy users. Of course you can disable it - just go to the plugin Options page, scroll to the bottom, uncheck "Add link to Meta SEO Pack" and save options.

Changelog

1.2

• Added option to add rel="nofollow" to links to admin section

2.0

• Added options to add `rel="nofollow"` to various links;
• Added new menu, split single options page into multiple pages;
• Send Send X-Robots-Tag in WP 2.7 too;
• Optimised options initialisation

1.1.2

• Added Polish translation

1.1.1

• Fixed catchable fatal error when getting post category

1.1

• Added options to configure title rewriting
• Fixed title rewriting for Custom Taxonomies
• Fixed error when mbstring PHP extension is not loaded

1.0.1

• Make plugin compatible with WordPress 2.7 (may work with lower versions too)

1.0

• Initial version