1. All in One SEO Pack : SEO is important. It’s the most important part of the website maintenance. and the most difficult. Main SEO tasks consist of managing title tag, and keyword  and description meta tag. Especially I think title tag and description meta tag are important.  ‘All in One SEO Pack’ plug-in make it very easy to maintain out of the box. You can define title , keyword, and description not only for your blog but for every articles using the article’s content. You can specifically define them manually or the plug-in will automatically generate them using tags and categories.  This is the most popular plug-in for SEO.

Once activated you will need to update the settings in the ‘All in One SEO’ sub menu under Settings. You will need to select enable and fill out the Home Title, Description, and Keywords.  For the other options, you can just use the default settings.

I think more important feature is that you can define individual settings per post. Without this feature, a WordPress blog will have the same keyword and descriptions throughout all the sub pages. That’s really terrible for the SEO.

There are other numerous SEO plug-ins in the WordPress website. ‘Headspace’ is another popular SEO plugin-in, but it’s a little bit more complicated than ‘All in One SEO’. 

I highly recommend ‘All in One SEO’ and you will see the results right away if your website has not been SEO optimized before. I had an experience that the traffic was increased about 20% after the plug-in installation. Be patient, the traffic increase was started about a week later.

If you know any other good SEO plug-in, let me know.

Next plug-in is about Google Analytics.

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Let’s see what the difference is first.

301 :  Moved Permanently. 301 tells you that the current website requested by current URI is moved to a new brand new URI, so you should drop the originally used URI. If you are moving a website to a different domain, this is the way should be done.

302 : Moved Temporarily. 302 tells you that the current redirection is temporary  and you should use the original request URI next time you visit again. If you are temporarily redirecting to a page (site update or special product promotion…), this is it.

Now let’s see How Google sees these redirection codes. If 301 is used, Google will move original request URI’s PageRank to the new destination URI. And eventually remove the request URI. If 302 is used PageRank will be intact to the original website and the original website will also benefit from the destination website’s content.

Many shared webhosting accounts set up both www (ex. http://www.example.com )and top level domain (http://example.com) to point to the same webpage by default. If you use them both website URLs thinking they are the same address, you are mistaken. In fact, you will eventually split the PageRank and pages might be considered as duplicated content.

I had this WordPress website to promote. Let’s say it’s http://www.example.com. I found that when I checked the Search engine status and searched the domain, I domain name was ‘example.com’ instead of ‘www.example.com’.  I just couldn’t understand because I was promoting only using ‘www.example.com’ everywhere , but ‘example.com’ was cached by Google.

But then I remembered that I used ‘example.com’  during the first website development. I setup Google analytic code in the website, and used ‘example.com’ most of the times accessing the website. I think that made the ‘example.com’ as the primary or first URL to Google instead ‘www.example.com’

So I checked the HTTP header (This can be easily done by run curl or wget tool ) and when I used ‘example.com’ , the server replied with 302 code! So that’s why ‘example.com’ still lived in the Google Search Engine.

HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
Date: Wed, 23 Sep 2009 12:30:32 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.11 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.11 OpenSSL/0.9.8i
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.9
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0,pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=c22b7be08ec5f5ee5c9238727b3eec3a; path=/
Location: http://www.example.com/
Content-Length: 0
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

I quickly checked the WordPress PHP files and wp_redirect function’s default redirect code was 302. Solution was to enforce 301 redirection and I found this Permalink Redirect WordPress Plugin. In fact there are other redirection plugins out there , but this plugin is simple and easy to setup. Just enabled the ‘Hostname Redirect’ check box from the option page and it’s showing 301. Thanks Scott.

I hope this update will resolve the issue with Google search result. When you are thinking of permanent website redirection, make sure you use “301”.

Here are some more reading on 301 and 302 redirections.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_redirection
http://news.stepforth.com/blog/2008/01/redirects-permanent-301-vs-temporary.php
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-discussing-302-redirects/

Here is an update. From Google Webmaster – Duplicate content and multiple site issues, there was a new introduction of link tag with ‘rel’ attribute that will help to correct and guide Google to move the destination website. Add below tag in the header in between <head> and </head>

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com"/>