Some onsite seo questions

[just2012]

 Hi guys, had a few specific questions for onsite seo factors that I wanted to pool the collective genius here for

I use a variety of plugins namely:

Platinum SEO - This seems pretty solid right out of the box but I am curious what the optimal settings would be, as there are a ton of them to check or uncheck. Nofollow/noindex for categories, tags, etc etc etc

I have a plugin that creates a silo structure using my categories so I want to make sure I'm not screwing that up, but at the same time I don't like the idea of having category/tag/etc pages creating dup content on my site

What other general tips have you all found to be currently working and confirmed thru solid testing as far as onsite stuff goes? Whether it be wordpress plugins, certain robots.txt files, or whatever other tips or tricks you may have found useful through experimentation.

I realize offpage linkbuilding is responsible for the vast majority of results but I like to maximize the effects by having ideal onsite factors in place (without going ocd on them!)

Thanks

[just2012]

As a follow up I'm also wondering about this duplicate content cure plugin that I use on all my sites. It's supposed to noindex/nofollow category pages/tag pages/etc but I'm wondering if this negates my siloing since it accesses things via the cats.

And reviewing some of the vids here I'm wondering if I should leave tags and cat pages etc followed and indexable and use them instead...

thoughts?

[Admin]

I've always been of the opinion that actually the core team at Wordpress have a pretty good idea of the plot and to be honest tend to leave my Wordpress Blogs pretty much "as is".

The only additions/alterations I would by and large make are as follows:

1. Alter permalink settings to "/%postname%/ as this means that my Title tags always read from the Title for the post and make that really keyword targeted and dense

2. By necessity enable the Akismet plugin and keep that up to date

3. I always use Arne Bracholts (spelling?) Google sitemap plugin as I reckon it is the best and makes rue that Google always keeps running back to the Blog.

4. I always make sure that the update services includes our SLS Premier Update list (http://simpleleveraging.com/slschat/index.php/topic,44.0.html ) and this also keep Google running back to our pages.