You can remove SEO plugins that are designed to optimize your meta description, keyword and to have canonical url feature to avoids duplicate content, the plugins that work that ways are All In One SEO Pack and Platinum SEO Pack, but we can have the same abilities offered by those plugins even without using them and remove them from your plugin storage. By replacing their roles with PHP codes, why you want to do that? Well, WordPress will be working much better if it’s using less plugin

Let see, we all know if using All In One SEO Pack as the result each of our page will have a unique description and keywords, they will help Google to identify our page and what is all about.

How if we use PHP code to replace their role? That sounds better

1. Ok now to have unique description you need to add the following PHP code inside Header.php (below title tag: <title> </title>)

<meta name="description" content="<?php the_excerpt_rss(); ?>" />

Note: the above code will automatically fetch the lines within the Excerpt to use as description, thus you need to write description in the excerpt box:

But if there’s no lines or description in the Excerpt, then there is no description, so if you want the code to fetch description whether there is description inside excerpt or not, replace:

<?php the_content(); ?>

With the following:

<?php the_excerpt(); ?>

The code will grab description from the first paragraph of yours even there is nothing inside your excerpt box

2. Now about unique keyword, what we need is “Tag” and turn it into keywords tag, well to have it, add the following code inside your Function.php:

function csv_tags() {
$posttags = get_the_tags();
foreach((array)$posttags as $tag) {
$csv_tags .= $tag->name . ',';
}
echo '<meta name="keywords" content="'.$csv_tags.'" />';
}


And then to call the keywords, add this code (put it below description tag), now:

<?php csv_tags(); ?>

So the whole codes will look like this:

<?php if (is_single() || is_page() ) : if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>
<meta name="description" content="<?php the_excerpt_rss(); $post_desc_length = 20; ?>" />
<?php csv_tags(); ?>
<?php endwhile; endif; elseif(is_home()) : ?>
<meta name="description" content="<?php bloginfo('description'); ?>" />
<meta name="keywords" content="Keyword1, Keyword2, Keyword3" />
<?php endif; ?>

So each of your page will have unique description and keyword now

3. Now about Canonical Url, just upgrade to WordPress 2.9, then you will have canonical url by default!

You may be interested to read How To Make WordPress Theme SEO Friendly Theme

Hope the post helps and see you again in the next post

By default WordPress set category url with the word “category” or prefix within it. But some people regard as ugly url and not too SEO url. Actually we can remove the word, and there are 2 ways to remove the word “category” in category url, one with plugin or add php tag in category template php. And in this post SEO Blog will explain on how to remove word “Category”.

I give a picture of what I am talking now, your category url by default is like this:

http://blogname.com/category/seo

And we want to remove the word “Category” into this url:

http://blogname.com/seo

*. SEO is the name of the category.

1. Using Plugins, there are 2 plugins I know that could remove the “category/” text from WordPress URL string

A. Using Top Level Categories

You can download the Top level Categories here.

B. Using Category Base Removal Plugin

You can download the Top level Categories here.

2. Using PHP tag. I think you better use plugins, because it’s a lot easier. But in regard of sharing knowledge I post this way too.

1. Login to your WordPress via FTP, and go to category-template.php.
2. And find this:

$catlink = str_replace('%category%', $category_nicename, $catlink);

3. And put the following tag right beneath the above tag:

$catlink = str_replace('category/', '', $catlink);

The tag within your category-template.php should look like the following image:

Click the image to have a bigger view.

And the last thing you need to do is change your permalink into this permalink structure (go to setting – > permalink):

%category%/%postname%

.

Done!

There is also a problem if your current permalink structure is none as the above permalink. To resolve this you need a Permalink migration plugins. Go to this post because I’ve listed number of migration permalink plugins. Just wait:D. See you in the next post.