SEO in WordPress or how I brought the site out of the "search pit"

In WordPress, there are several popular plugins for SEO: All in One SEO Pack and WordPress SEO by Yoast. The first one is slightly more popular (at the time of writing this note), but it has several significant shortcomings (fortunately, not fatal ones).

A few days ago, I had to take a look at a certain website, and everything was pretty sad there: Yandex ban, low views on Google, and overall, it looked like the patient had used the services of our healthcare system (covered in bandages and not breathing).

When analyzing the situation, a number of problems were identified.

First of all, the resource author incorrectly composed the keywords and meta descriptions. The meta descriptions did not correspond to the post text, the keywords were weakly logically connected both among themselves and poorly selected in the context of the note (they were not "key" words, and many of them were stop words). In addition, special characters were used in the SEO titles (all sorts of Unicode junk). Actually, I don't know how search engines look at this, but logic suggests that it's unlikely to be good.

The initial problem was that the author wanted a custom description for each note. This was done with a makeshift method: the meta description was displayed as the note description on archive pages. This resulted in a gross violation of SEO rules. The conclusion (mostly for myself =): NEVER DO THIS (do not display the meta description in a visible place). For this, you should use the excerpt feature of WordPress. It's actually quite easy to use:

1) Add the following code to the post content output locations in the templates

<?php the_excerpt(); ?>

....and that's it from the code side!

2) Configure the admin panel: click on "Screen Options" and check the box next to "Excerpt" (see image)

This way, an input field for entering the note description will be added.

Secondly, there were problems with the settings of the All in One SEO Pack itself. It was adding all the child note keywords to the meta tags on category pages, resulting in a substantial number of keywords (more than 100 per page), which also doesn't promise anything good. (I won't raise the question now whether it's worth indexing category pages at all, just to clarify, they were being indexed on the resource).

I was also surprised to find out that using All in One SEO Pack, it's not possible to set custom keywords and descriptions for categories. That's why I migrated to WordPress SEO by Yoast. It was nice to discover that you can easily transfer all the data for existing notes from the previous plugin without any pain; I only had to manually fill in the "focus word" field. Now there is an opportunity to add correct seo tags for category pages as well.

The result of such a complex of actions can be seen in the first image.