If you have an online business then you must have known the importance of organic traffic and thus about SEO. Although the SEO strategies keep updating with time but a standard on page optimization is still the most compulsory base on which the success of your business depends. Whether you are a newbie or an expert, WordPress offers user-friendly and effective SEO plugins to help you rank higher in search engine results by optimizing your website/blog easily. By far, there are two most popular WordPress plugins for SEO purpose- Yoast SEO and All in One SEO Pack. Finding out that which one is the best is quite difficult since both of these offer great features. We here tried to dig deep to point out the differences these plugins have.
Yoast SEO vs All in One SEO Pack
It’s remarkable that both Yoast SEO and All in One SEO Pack have more than 1M installs. So one can guess what popularity extent these plugins cover. Here we’re differentiating them on basis of different points-
1. Installation & Setup
First of all, you need to install both Yoast SEO and All in One SEO Pack plugins. For Yoast SEO, after the activation, go to SEO >> Dashboard >> General and launch the configuration wizard.
The settings in Yoast are precisely divided into pages which further has different tabs for respective settings. If you need any kind of help then a Help center is also provided, just click it and it will show you video/text about all the useful options.
On-screen help, well-organized settings and configuration wizard for beginners make Yoast SEO super easy to set it up on your WordPress website.
Unlike Yoast, All in One lists all the settings in one place at “General Settings” and thus all configurations are placed on one screen only that’s quite easier and faster approach to understand things. This also has a help icon to help new users.
Who wins the Setup game? – Both
2. Social Media Optimization
As we all know that social media also plays an important role in getting a business well established from search engine’s point of view. Yoast SEO provides an exclusive section for optimizing all the major social networks. In each blog post, you can add a custom image, title and description for Twitter & Facebook in your own way.
All in One SEO too has its own social network section but not as wide as Yoast SEO comparatively.
Who wins the SM game? – Yoast SEO
3. Meta Tags and content optimization
Meta tags (title and description) are the snippets that you see first in search results before coming to the website.
Yoast SEO analyses meta tags instantly and shows errors you should correct like if you have missed focus keyword either in title or description or in both. It also shows whether you’ve used focus keyword in your post’s content or not. Yoast SEO also lets you see the snippet preview to let you know how your page/post will look in SERP.
All in One SEO Pack also offers an SEO meta box where you can write meta title and description.
It’s almost like Yoast SEO but the content analysis feature is much better in Yoast SEO.
Who wins the Meta tags game? – Yoast SEO
4. XML Sitemaps
To rank in search engine, the content of your website must be indexed. With Yoast SEO, you’re offered built-in sitemap functionality.
When you activate the sitemap functionality of Yoast SEO, every time when you publish new content (including images), it notifies search engine about it. There’s an option to exclude a post too if you don’t want it to be indexed.
On the other hand, All in One SEO also supports XML sitemap as a standard feature. From feature manager, you have to activate it as it’s not automatically activated. All in One SEO also lets you add those pages to sitemap which are not part of your website.
Who wins the sitemap game? : Both
5. Other Features
Yoast provides some more features like
- Bulk editor
- Breadcrumb navigator
- Search console importer
- File editor (for Robots.txt and .htaccess) etc.
All in One too has many extra modules like
- Performance manager
- Robots.txt Editor
- Bad Bot Blocker
- File editor (for Robots.txt and .htaccess) etc.
Here you can see that both of these WordPress plugins are great but if you want to be seen on first 5 results whenever someone searches for your service/business name on Google, we find Yoast SEO as the best WordPress SEO plugin and suggest you to go for it because in terms of usability, design, and most importantly content analysis/keywords optimization, All in One SEO gets defeated by Yoast SEO.
P.S. – To get your website rank higher in SERP, using an SEO-optimized WordPress themes can be an icing on the cake 🙂