SEO Features on the Our-Hometown Web Platform

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The Our-Hometown web platform utilizes the All in One SEO plug-in to provide a convenient interface to manage many aspects of the search engine optimization for your website.

All in One SEO Setup

All in One SEO provides a convenient wizard to guide you through the initial setup process, prompting for information about your website, including metadata, contact information, social links, and search appearance.

All in One SEO Dashboard

First we will go to the admin dashboard and find the All in One SEO menu and click on Dashboard.

AIO-SEO from Admin

Step-by-Step: All in One SEO Setup Wizard

The following is a walkthrough of the setup process utilizing the wizard.

Prompts you for basic information about your website: Category, Title and Home Page Description.

Step 1: Site Category & Description

Asks for additional information for a representative contact and default logos for the site and social media.

Step 2: Additional Site Information

Scrolling down on Step 2 provides fields for all your various social media links.

Step 2: Social Profiles

Allows you to choose or accept the default SEO features to enable on your website.

Step 3: SEO Features

Provides a preview of your search appearance including a Google Snippet showing how your site will appear on their search results page.

Step 4: Search Appearance

On this step you can choose to provide an email and enable recommendations from the plug-in. This step doesn’t affect your SEO rankings but enables the plug-in to audit your site and provide feedback for ongoing SEO management.

Step 5: Site Analyzer and Recommendations

This is another optional step prompting for an upgrade to the PRO version of the plugin to gain access to additional features or enter a license key if already purchased. Additionally, several of these PRO features are provided by other plug-ins on the Our-Hometown platform.

Step 6: Upsale to the PRO version of All in One SEO


All in One SEO Quicklinks

This set of links from the dashboard provide more advanced and granular control of how the plugin handles your website’s content. These same links can also be found in the All in One SEO submenu.

All in One SEO Quicklinks

Search Appearance

These settings affect how your content will appear on major search engines, such as Google.

This tab provides similar options to Step 2 from the All in One Setup wizard: Title separator; Homepage snippet preview, contact, and default site logo.

Search Appearance - Global Settings

You can further differentiate how different content types (posts, pages, articles, pdfs, etc.) will appear in search results on this tab.

AIO-SEO Search Appearance - Content Types

Here you can dive deeper into search results previews based upon categories or tags, depending on how these are used across your website.

AIO-SEO Search Appearance 3 - Taxonomies

Unless you are using the PRO version of All in One SEO, the only feature offered on this tab lets you decide how image attachment urls are to be implemented. The defaults are recommended.

AIO-SEO-Search-Appearance-4-Image-SEO

This tab allows you to specify search appearance parameters for archive types, such as author, date, or content (articles, posts, ads, pdfs, etc.).

AIO-SEO Search Appearance 5 - Archives

Finally the Advanced tab offers options for Robots, Sitelinks and Shortcodes, as well as Meta Keywords and Pagination formats.

AIO-SEO Search Appearance 6 - Advanced

Social Networks

These settings affect how your content will appear on major social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.

This tab is the same as part two of Step 2 in the setup wizard, where you can specify all your links to whichever social media platforms you use.

AIO-SEO Social Networks - Profiles

Here you can control how you want Facebook and other social media to display a preview with images and a text excerpt when a link to your site is shared. Of particular note is the Default Post Image Source as for most social shares you want to include the featured image from that post. The Default Post Facebook Image in the next setting is only used for shares that do not include any images. At the bottom of the tab you will find a preview of how your default shares will appear.

AIO-SEO Social Networks - Facebook

Similar to the Facebook tab you can select the type of twitter post to be used upon sharing, as well as the default image source and the fallback image to use, in addition to a post preview.

AIO-SEO Social Networks - Twitter

If you are using Pinterest you must first provide a verification code which will then give you access to the similar sharing options to the aforementioned tabs.

AIO-SEO Social Networks - Pinterest

SEO Analysis

If you provided an email address in Step 6 of the setup wizard, you will have access to the SEO analysis tools provided by the plug-in. Note that from the plug-in dashboard in the support panel you will find a link “Relaunch Setup Wizard” if you want to be led through the initial setup again.

On this page you will be shown an Overall Site Score based upon the results of its Checklist. You can filter items on the checklist by All, Important, etc. By then clicking on the arrow to the right of each listing you can see the current status and choose to edit a particular setting directly from the recommendation.

AIO-SEO Analysis - Audit Checklist

You can provide the plug-in with any URL and it will run the same checklist returning a score and recommendations for comparison to your own site audit.

AIO-SEO Analysis - Competitor Audit

This tool will give you feedback based on a headline you provide, with an overall score and a breakdown of properties that will improve the headline’s search appearances.

AIO-SEO Analysis - Headline Analyzer


SEO Management Per Article

The most common options for customizing SEO are available in the Lite version of the plug-in. In particular, you may Focus Keyphrases or provide an alternate Title, Description, Excerpt or Featured Image apart from those in the article being shared.

Under this tab you can change how your article snippet will appear in contrast to the default settings established in the setup wizard or via the Search Appearance quicklinks on the main plug-in dashboard.

For the article and meta description, you can use the provided tag variables or simply type your desired text into the appropriate field.

SEO Per Article - General

A very important SEO feature that is also set here is a Focus Keyphrase. In the Lite version of All in One SEO, you are allowed only a main keyphrase, while the PRO version allows you to enter additional secondary keyphrases. 

According to the plug-in documentation on keyphrase usage:

This feature is especially helpful when writing blog Posts where you may write about a primary subject (Focus Keyphrase) as well as secondary terms (Additional Keyphrases).

It’s not as useful for Pages of your site which may have multiple focuses for this content, or where the content is generic such as a Contact Us page.

Start by entering the primary subject you’re writing about in the Focus Keyphrase field and click the Add Focus Keyphrase button.

You will also see our recommendations for improving your on-page SEO beneath each keyphrase and in the Page Analysis section.

SEO Per Article - Focus Keyphrase

The Page Analysis section provides three categories of recommendations: Basic SEO, Title, and Readability. This final sub-tab is quite informative with analyses of passive voice, transition words, sentence length, etc.

All in One SEO social settings such as Title, Description and Image Source can be modified from their defaults under the Social tab.

This sub-tab provides you with a preview of the article as it will appear on Facebook. If you would like to change anything from the defaults, perhaps a differently-cropped or completely new image, or any alterations to the title and description.

SEO Per Article - Social - Facebook

The Twitter sub-tab is very similar, although you have the option to pull data from the Facebook tab (Title and Description). The Image Source can be changed from the default as well as the Twitter Card Type.

SEO Per Article - Social - Twitter

If you have any questions or would like assistance, please reach out to our customer support team at ops@our-hometown.com.

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