Way back when, I wrote about my favorite SEO plugin, the All In One SEO Pack. I wrote that post so long ago (nearly 5 years ago) and a lot has changed with it during that time. It’s still my favorite SEO plugin (I like it even more than the Yoast plugin), and its built-in social media features make it even better.
Let’s take a look!
All in One SEO Pack’s Social Media Features
There are 2 places you’ll look for all of your All in One SEO Pack’s plugin settings – Under the All in One SEO tab along your WordPress dashboard sidebar, and underneath the main text area of your blog post or website page.
Here’s where you go if you are accessing the plugin’s settings or activating its features:
Here’s what the social media & SEO section looks like on your website page or blog post:
To turn on the social media features within your All in One SEO Pack plugin, click on Feature Manager located at the bottom of the pop-out menu that displays when you hover over “All in One SEO” in your left sidebar. The Social Meta feature is one of the top 2 in the list. Simply click on it to activate it. It will change from black and grey, to black and blue when active, as seen below.
As a quick side note, this is where you can activate the XML Sitemap feature that’s built in to this plugin. This helps keep you from having an additional plugin on your site dedicated only for your XML sitemap.
Setting up the All in One SEO Pack Plugin’s Social Meta Features
Now you can visit your Social Meta Settings from the All in One SEO Pack menu list (as seen in the first screen shot). You can set default social media sharing settings such as a default image to use (in case you don’t create a custom image for that post or page), add your social media profile links, customize your Facebook sharing settings – including your publisher author ID, if you use one – and your Twitter Card.
Here are a few screenshots of what some of these areas look like on our site.
How you choose to set up a lot of this will depend on your site and your needs. The great thing is that you can click on every question mark, and an explanation of what that line or field is will pop up for you.
At the bottom of the page, you can click to scan to make sure you don’t have any duplicate social meta tags.
Make sure you click to Update Options before leaving this page.
All in One SEO Pack Blog Post Settings
This section and capabilities are the same on pages or posts, and is located beneath the text area when you are in Edit mode of a blog post or page.
To start, you’ll see 2 tabs – the Main Settings and the Social Settings. Under the Main Settings is where you add your custom title tag and meta description for your post or page. Click over to the Social Settings tab to enter your social media info.
You do not have to use your custom title tag as your social title, though it’s often easy to reuse that. Note that a title tag maxes out at 60ish characters but you can go up to 95 characters for your Facebook title. A meta description maxes out at 150, but on the social settings side of things, you can go up to 1,000 characters.
Basically, you get many more characters to work with when you are providing social media meta information.
Next, we move down to the image portion of your social meta data. Because we’ve already set our header image to be our default image, we always see that image listed first, followed by all the other images we’ve uploaded and added to this post or page. Simply click on the radio button next to the image you want used for this post. The image you select is what will show up when your link is shared on social media.
You can directly upload a custom image here. It’s good to know where the Debug this Post button is located, too. If your image or title isn’t pulling up correctly when your page is shared, come back here and click to debug it.
Your Twitter Card section is at the very bottom. You have the choice between Summary Large Image and Summary.
When you save your Page or Post draft, or click to schedule it, you will save all the info you’ve added to your All in One SEO Pack SEO and Social settings sections.
Completing all the social settings fields means your content will receive the maximum benefit possible when shared on social media networks.
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