This post is to discuss two of the best WordPress SEO plugins i.e., Yoast SEO and All in one SEO Pack. Basically, it will be a detailed comparison between these two. For those who find it difficult to choose one on their own. I am pretty sure that by the end of this article you will have your hot favorite decided.
For the sake of newbies let’s spare a paragraph on the importance of Search Engine Optimization. SEO is important for everyone owning a WordPress website. Why? Because it brings you traffic and organic traffic is simply one of the most important channels for the website traffic. SEO is the platform where you develop and implement different techniques to get a high ranking in search engine page results. This is one of the most important factors to focus on because no matter how good your content is you need visitors and customers (if you are selling something, some e-store type of thing) to get benefit from that content. SEO aims to increase more traffic to your website. If you want your website to have a higher page rank in Google, Bing, Yahoo, then there are a lot of chances that your traffic will increase.
Since the article is based on the comparison so we’ll do that comprehensively but first, let’s take a quick overview of what to expect from a good SEO plugin?
- Easy installation, Easy accessibility, and Easy guide.
- Basics first, i.e., to increase traffic and search engine ranking.
- Provides simple start-up guides (which only Yoast SEO gives whereas others just throw you out to the wolves)
- Welcoming to advances that are continuously coming in the field like automatic formatting,
- Supports self-customization.
These are the things that you should consider before selecting any SEO plugin.
Now coming back to the topic at hand i.e., the comparison between two hot favorite and most popular SEO plugins. We will discuss both the SEO plugins one by one focusing on all the basic features in detail.
Yoast SEO plugin:
Yoast with millions of followers and thousands of downloads to date is by far one of the most popular SEO plugins. As an SEO plugin, Yoast is a powerful tool since it offers a wide variety of functions. It’s known for efficient, effective functionalities, and consistency in results. This popularity caters to many other reasons which are as follows:
- It’s best for beginners because it’s easily available within the WordPress Plugin Directory. All you have to do is simply install it and activate afterward.
- It gives users a lot of flexibility over the site’s content by letting them set up titles, meta descriptions, and social sharing information on a per-post basis on their own.
- It gives you an easy way to set up a sitemap and adds some basic schema.
- It’s divided into a free and advanced version.
How does Yoast SEO plugin work?
Yoast integrates itself into your site’s ‘edit page’. “Yoast SEO Tab” appears whenever you edit a post or a page.
Other than this here are four more tabs to be aware of within the Yoast tab, two of which fall under the “Content Optimization” category (this Content Optimization options are the main reason to makes Yoast unique). The first in this category is the “Keyword” tab. Focus keywords provide the foundation for any optimization effort on Yoast. From the Keyword tab, you’re also able to customize the snippet that will appear as your page’s search engine result.
NOTE: Before doing anything else, decide on the keyword that’s most relevant to the content you’re creating. Add this keyword into Yoast’s “Focus Keyword” panel, and you’ll find that a whole new set of “Page Analysis” features pop up.
Alongside focus keyword tab we have another important tab which is “Readability”. This tab decides the readability of your content on the basis of already set criteria.
NOTE: This has a direct impact on your SEO score because it decides that how consumable your content really is.
Next comes the “Social tab”. Under the social tab, you’ll find all of your options for creating integrations for both Facebook and Twitter. With the options here, you’re able to adjust titles, descriptions, and images for each network.
Moving on to the next tab after social that is “Advanced” tab. In this tab, you’ll find options for setting up a page as “followed” or “no followed” by search engines. This tab also gives options for setting up canonical URLs and index or no index.
Sum up:
This was an all-around up of Yoast SEO plugin which pretty much explains that it’s nothing out of the box and pretty easy to comprehend. For beginners, in most cases, it’s not necessary to deal with a lot of settings or to set up every tab accordingly to get the score set up right. Just make sure to handle the first two options from Yoast SEO tab very efficiently and you’ll be good to go. Moreover, Customer service never disappoints you here. Yoast SEO has its own website with courses, an amazing SEO blog, eBooks, and the option to hire some of the developers for assistance. You can also contact them by email and check out the FAQs page.
All in One SEO Pack:
Like Yoast SEO, All in one SEO Pack is also among the top favorite SEO plugin. It too has millions of downloads to date which proves its popularity. And exactly like Yoast, this plugin’s popularity caters to multiple reasons.
- Easy installation.
- The free version of All in One SEO Pack includes meta custom titles/meta for posts, pages, and custom post types
XML sitemapsRedirect attachments to the parent post, Ping search engines, Built-in API for other themes/plugins to extend, All in One SEO Pack, Social meta-management, Robots.txt editor, .htaccess editor, Bad bot blocker, Basic schema markup, and Basic WooCommerce support. - In Pro version, you get access to Video sitemaps, SEO for taxonomies, More advanced WooCommerce support, Premium support, and screencasts.
- Ther’s no need for extra extensions or demo content since it installs directly.
- All in One SEO Pack does not offer any analysis for a focus keyword or readability like Yoast SEO does. But this doesn’t mean that you don’t get the SEO analysis of your content. We’ll discuss it in detail shortly.
- All in One SEO has keywords disabled by default. If you want to use keywords, then you can enable them fro keyword settings option.
All in One SEO Pack is initially divided into three core parts.
General Settings: This is where you get to configure site-wide SEO settings.
Feature Manager: This is where you get to enable/disable specific modules, like XML sitemaps and social meta
Meta Box: This is where you get to configure SEO/social settings for individual pieces of content.
General setting:
The All in One SEO Pack General Settings area is a lengthy list of settings. Basically, it’s everything that the Yoast SEO puts in different tabs. The only difference is it’s crammed into one place. This settings list contain possibly everything that you can expect. Each setting option has a question mark next to it and clicking on it will show you a help message about the option and what it does with a link to the relevant help documentation article.
Home page setting:
Here you can configure the settings of your home page. Under homepage settings section, you can specify a title for your homepage. This title can be different from your WordPress website’s title. If you leave this field blank, then All in One SEO will use the default WordPress website title.
Title Settings:
Title settings allow you to set the default title templates for every page generated by WordPress. This could be a single post, main page, archives, tags, or category pages. The Title Settings options are the equivalent of Yoast SEO’s Titles & Metas area. Like Yoast SEO, you can use variables to dynamically insert information following a certain formula.
Custom Post Type Settings:
Under custom post type settings, you can enable All in One SEO plugin for any custom post types used on your site. This is helpful if a plugin adds a custom post type – like events pages or if you’re using your own custom post types and you want them to rank in the search engines.
Display settings:
Display settings will allow you to show post’s SEO title and description on posts screen. It is enabled by default and you can leave this setting as it is. Basically this let you control where All in One SEO Pack shows up in your interface, which is a welcome feature given that Yoast SEO makes third-party developers create plugins to strip away the Yoast SEO admin notices.
Feature Manager:
All in One SEO Pack is a powerful plugin, and as you have seen it has tons of options. Some of its features are not available to users out of the box. You will need to activate them by visiting All in One SEO » Features Manager page. Enabling these features will add Social Meta and XML Sitemap items under your All in One SEO settings.
Sum up:
First of all, let me clear these are not all the features which these plugins offer. They are only the ones on whose behalf you can choose one suitable for you. When it comes to picking a winner or the perfect pick, it really is too close to call. Both are excellent plugins, and either choice will most likely serve you exceptionally well. It’s all about personal preference since some developers might enjoy All in One SEO Pack a little more. Because in All in One SEO Pack you can go in there and adjust more settings depending on your own preferences While in Yoast everything is pretty much ready.
The final choice or verdict is obviously yours.
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