Use Lazy Plugins or Fix Your Own Post Slugs
There are a lot of plugins in the world and frankly there are many of them I just can’t recommend, especially to noobs. The first one is the All in One SEO Pack. This plugin is popular only for one reason, it is for the lazy blogger who won’t take the time to do any SEO themselves. In days past you could get by with using this method, but now it hurts as many people as it helps. Frankly if you are too lazy to take the two minutes or less it takes to do a good SEO job with your posts, then not only are you setting yourself up for an epic fail, you will deserve it. Forget about all the magic meta tagging, alter your post slug, write your page description, fill in your image info plugins that are out there. Disregard however popular they might be, even Vanilla Ice and NKOTB were massively popular at one point in time. If you want to do a good job with your blog you will need exactly two plugins. HeadSpace 2 and Tiny MCE Advanced.
Here is how to maximize your SEO using these two plugins.
First on the write window you will have a section right under the title called Permalink. This is your page slug. You want this to be as short as possible, but also to contain as many important words as possible.
If this had trash words like, if, the, but etc that have no SEo importance I would simply hit edit and remove them, making sure there is a dash in between each word left. In times past if you used special characters in your title your page slug would reflect them making your pretty permalinks very ugly and SEO unfriendly. I think there will come a time when WordPress automatically removes trashwords from the permalink, but until then it is left up to you.
There are plugins that claim to fix your post-slugs by removing trashwords, but the one thing I have yet to see one do is fix your old links automatically. You still ave to open up the post delete the old slug and let it rewrite the new one. This is a waste of your time. If there was a plugin that would do this automatically then that would be worth getting, but as far as I know, none of them do and I have tried more than a dozen of them.
If you are editing an old blog you will want to add one more plugin to the mix, Redirection. Written by the same guy who brought us John Godley who also wrote Headspace 2, Redirection will redirect incoming hits from the old link to the new link. You don’t need any other plugin not even headspace 2 or redirection for change your old permalinks, but those two are very helpful, if you want people to find your posts easily. The best way to edit post slugs in my opinion is open up the manage meta data tab that Headspace 2 adds to WordPress.
The little green icon on the right will automatically generate a page slug for you if you have the pull down set on page-slug. In fact it will automatically generate almost any content based on the post that you need simply by pushing the button. That said it makes headspace no better than any other piece of automated crap. The power of headspace is it will allow you to quickly edit the information on anywhere from 25 to 200 posts at a time. I do suggest staying under fifty though for page slugs, because redirection can get bogged down trying to do too much at once.
If you don’t know what words to remove from your post slugs, by all means download a fix your slug plugin with a list and have a look at it. If you are proficient in the English language enough to write an adequate post though, you will know the difference between what is and isn’t an important word.
There you have it folks the fastest easiest way to fix all your post slugs not just your future ones. In part two we till talk about your other neglected metadata, page title and page description.
I actually wrote a post myself on All In One SEO where I was testing it and pretty much said what you said, that if you’re doing all the work then what’s the point of the plugin. I do think it gives some folks a chance to change some things around without having to know a lot, but for others, it’s more of a placebo than anything really useful.
Mitch’s last blog post..Number 301, A Year To Remember
AIOSP was once the only game in town and before SEO was actually easy, however it quickly became outdated and superseded by far superior plugins, but all the bigwigs telling everyone AIOSP was the be all end all failed to notice. What is laughable some of the big name bloggers still promoting it aren’t even using it anymore and it is apparent if you check their page source code.