Anyone looking for WordPress SEO plugins will probably have heard that Yoast SEO and All in One SEO Pack are the best of the fold. But which one is better than the other? This article will highlight the most important attributes of both plugins and guide you towards deciding which works best depending on your SEO needs. Read on to learn more.
General information
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Both contenders are among the most popularly used plugins in WordPress for SEO, and both feature devout userbases. All in One SEO Pack was created in 2007 and has since gathered a massive userbase. Yoast SEO was created in 2010, initially as WordPress SEO by Yoast and soon grew to rival the former. Let’s now compare various aspects of the two plugins.
1.Setup and installation
WordPress SEO plugins are supposed to take out most of the work in setting up a website with good SEO features, particularly for beginners.
Yoast SEO comes alive when you install and activate it (learn how here). There are many options that need to be passed through for setup as well. Once activated, you’ll receive a prompt to start a tour of the plugin’s features. Settings are neatly divided into pages and tabs for different settings so that you can easily locate whatever option you’re interested in. For all pages, you can get on-screen help through the purple Help button at the top. This makes it very easy for beginners to find exactly what they need.
The All in One SEO Pack should also be activated and installed before you can use it. Once activated, the All in One SEO item shows on the menu below your dashboard. All of its settings are on one page, which can be a bit overwhelming, but may also be seen as faster during setup compared to the former’s multi-page layout. The page is divided into sections, each handling a specific feature or area. You can get descriptions or additional documentation about each option by clicking the help icon next to it.
Conclusion: Both plugins have many setup options but have worked to simplify things for users. However, the multi-page and tab layout of Yoast SEO has a slight edge in terms of ease of use.
2.Day-to-Day SEO work
SEO is a long-term, on-going activity and every page added to the website will require use of your plugin for optimization in order to increase visibility.
Yoast SEO has a great content analysis tool to help optimize all posts and pages on your site. Below your post editor is Yoast SEO’s metabox which includes a focus keyword field, content analysis and a snippet preview. The snippet preview highlights how the title and description will appear in search results pages. Yoast SEO automatically takes the post title as title and uses an excerpt as the description. You can, however, change this using the Edit Snippet option. You can enter your focus keyword in the keyword field, which allows the plugin to analyze your content for the keyword.
There are two more sections in the Yoast SEO metabox: the gear icon switches to advanced view – beginners are advised to never use this option unless you’re sure about what you’re doing. Here, you can also stop search engines from following or indexing specific posts or pages. You also have the social icon which leads to your post’s/page’s social settings. You can set article images for Twitter and Facebook. The main title and description will be used to fill the open graph metatags.
The All in One SEO Pack also features a similar metabox you can use to edit SEO features on each post/page. It is located below your post editor. Unlike the former, this is a simpler metabox, offering options to edit title and description but no SEO page scoring or content analysis. Each page has advanced settings, allowing you to change indexing or following settings, and you can even turn off the plugin for a particular page/post. Social settings can be edited after turning on the Social Meta add-on from All in One SEO>>Features Manager. Doing this adds a social settings tab where you can set custom images and descriptions for social sharing.
Conclusion: You can easily edit SEO settings on a post by post basis with both plugins. All in One SEO Pack takes a lean, clean approach, permitting users to add additional fields they need. Yoast, however, uses a decisions approach and includes all important SEO features for each site. Its SEO scoring, focus keyword and content analysis capabilities give it an advantage over the former
3.Additional Features and Tools
On-page SEO is a comprehensive process, which is why both plugins come with additional tools and features allowing comprehensive customization. These features exist so that you don’t have to install more plugins to handle specific tasks, instead offering an all-in-one solution for you.
Yoast SEO includes most features required for on-site optimization including Breadcrumb Navigation, XML Sitemaps, Inbuilt .htaccess and robots.txt file editor, data importation from Google Search Console, Open Graph Metatags and Export/Import SEO Data features among others.
All in One SEO Pack also has many features, except that these aren’t activated by default; you have to activate them through All in One SEO>>Features Manager. These include robots.txt file editor, XML Sitemap, Bad Bot Blocker, Import/Export SEO Data, Open Graph metatags and Performance Manager among others.
Conclusion: In this aspect, both solutions have nearly the same additional features and provide an all-in-one solution. While All in One SEO Pack lacks GSC data importation and Breadcrumbs navigation, these features won’t have a drastic negative impact on your SEO if other aspects are well taken care of.
The verdict:
Both are great plugins for SEO, but based on the factors presented here alone, your Vancouver SEO expert will have to recommend Yoast SEO, which has a slight edge in many areas over All in One SEO Pack. It has more offer features and specific settings that can greatly boost your SEO efforts. Its best feature, by far, has to be the content analysis and SEO scoring tool which helps beginners to truly appreciate how to create SEO-friendly content with good titles and descriptions as well as proper use of keywords.
