When you has install you can setting on Home Title, Home Descriptions and Home keywords than your site target....
I use All in One SEO for one of my websites and I've been quite happy with it but recently when setting up a new Wordpress site I came accross "Greg's High Performance SEO" and although the sites not been up long enough to know which is better I can say that this High Performance SEO one has more options and better individual page control.
Yes I would recommend a auto pinger plugin as it will helps to notify bots to come your site and index your pages! However you can do it without using any plugin as you have an option inside your Admin Panel at Writing Settings option!
You will need to go in and fill in all of the information for your site. This is similar to the "general" tab at the top, but there is more in depth info at the bottom. I have a certain way that I do everything, and everyone probably does it different. There is also info to fill out on every page and post if you want to maximize your efforts. I know people that say it is not necessary to fill out the info for each post, but I always do. Personal preferences.