If you have installed WordPress but not an SEO plugin, then you are seriously hurting your chances of success in search engine listings. The default settings in WordPress simply don’t give you enough control. Currently, the best plugin to use is the free one from Yoast.

Once you have installed the plugin, go through each of the tabs and adjust the settings to your liking.

But before you do that, go to the Settings option and change your permalink structure. I prefer the post name option, but if you have a very large and busy site, you can choose one of the other options.

Then move on to Yoast SEO settings.

The general tab allows you to easily link your website with the webmaster tools provided by Google and Bing and also allows you to claim your site on Alexa without having to upload a file to your server.

Once you’ve done that, you need to move on to the Titles and Metas section.

This is where the real SEO magic happens!

Yoast allows you to force a rewrite of your page and post titles. If the plugin thinks this is necessary for your chosen theme, it will automatically check the box, but if it finds that some of your page title settings are being ignored, then it’s worth checking this box.

What it does is make sure that the title displayed in the browser tab and (more importantly) in the search results is what you think.

Yoast will give you a preview of your title and also tell you when you’ve used too many characters, which would mean Google would truncate it with an ellipsis.

This isn’t an entirely precise science because Google now takes character widths into account in your title, so it pays to be cautious and use a few fewer than the plugin suggests.

There are several other settings in the general tab where you can remove certain types of pages (such as archive pages) from being indexed and potentially leading to duplicate content issues on your site.

The post types tab is also important.

WordPress normally includes the post date before the meta description (the text that displays below the page title in search results), but the plugin does not allow this by default in its preview. Instead, you need to check the appropriate box on the post types page for the date to display in the preview.

Personally, I had missed doing this on my blog until recently, which meant that Google cut off a lot of my page meta descriptions. Once you’ve checked the box, and you only need to do so for the posts option, the preview and suggested number of characters in the description will again be accurate.

There is also an option to change the default look of post and page titles. So if, like me, you don’t want your site’s name in the title, you can remove it from the defaults, saving you from forgetting to do it on each individual post.

The other main setting to pay attention to is the one that allows you to link your Facebook, Twitter and Google+ profiles and make sure they are coordinated and appear the way you would like.