All in One SEO Pack vs Yoast SEO – The Two Top WordPress SEO Plugins Compared!
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SEO has moved on leaps and bounds since old-school tactics such as keyword stuffing and spammy link building led to search engine domination. Although the finer SEO strategies have changed, there remains one underlying constant: Proper on-site optimization is the solid foundation on which all of your SEO efforts should be built.
Fortunately, the WordPress core ships with some useful built-in functionalities for optimizing your site, including meta tags, neat and tidy navigation links, and optimized permalinks.
If you’re serious about ranking your website at the top of Google, though, you’ll almost certainly want a little more. As ever, the best strategy with WordPress is to install a dedicated plugin with purpose-built functionalities — in this case, a search engine optimization plugin.
With SEO as important today as ever, there are plenty of SEO plugins out there — so which should you choose? To help answer this question, we’re pitting two of the very best (not to mention the most popular) SEO plugins against each other: Yoast SEO (formerly known as ‘WordPress SEO by Yoast’) versus All in One SEO Pack.
To allow for a more in-depth discussion, we’ll be reviewing each plugin’s features in four areas, including:
- overall settings and configurations
- on-page content analysis
- social media
- XML sitemaps.
First up, Yoast.
Introducing Yoast SEO
The name Yoast is synonymous with SEO in the WordPress community. The brainchild of Joost de Valk, Yoast SEO is used by more than a million WordPress users.
However, ‘Yoast SEO’ actually started life in 2008 as an SEO tutorial. The SEO world has moved forward heaps since then, but, if you’re interested, here’s an early version of the article (courtesy of Wayback Machine).
The world wouldn’t meet the now-legendary plugin until two years later; it hit the official WordPress repository in October 2010. At the time, it was known as WordPress SEO by Yoast — or WordPress SEO for short.
In July 2015, the plugin was rebranded as Yoast SEO — a name used to this day.
Now in its sixth year, Yoast SEO is available in 17 languages and has been downloaded a whopping 25 million times. This makes Yoast SEO one of the most famous, most popular, and most downloaded WordPress plugins of all time.
Settings and Configurations
After installing Yoast SEO, first-time users are treated to a quick tour of the plugin. With so many settings available, this is the easiest way to find your bearings.
Yoast SEO’s plethora of settings can be found by navigating to SEO > General, where you’ll be able to switch between five tabs. The Webmaster Tools tab is particularly useful, allowing you to integrate your website with four integral programs — particularly Google and Bing, but also Alexa and Yandex.
However, it’s only when you get to the Titles & Metas screen that you get into the nitty-gritty. For example, by switching between the tabs, you’ll be able to specify a title template for all aspects of your WordPress website — homepage, posts, pages, custom post types, categories, tags, and archives pages. You can also choose whether you want to no index a particular post type by default, display a date in search engine snippets, or enable the Yoast SEO meta box.
Yoast SEO also supports breadcrumbs, hidden behind the Advanced settings screen. Breadcrumbs improve visitor navigation and give search engines a better understanding of your site’s structure.
Content Analysis
When it comes to content analysis tools, Yoast SEO is one of, if not the, best around.
You can find Yoast’s content analyzer in a meta box directly below the WordPress text editor — provided it hasn’t been disabled.
The first important feature is the Snippet Editor. This allows you to edit — and preview — how your content appears in the SERPs. Specifically, it gives you the opportunity to customize your SEO title and rewrite your meta description — both play a significant role in boosting CTR.
Next, we have Yoast SEO’s main attraction: The Content Analysis tool. To use this tool, simply input your focus keyword (the phrase you hope to rank for in Google). Users of the free version of the plugin can only input one keyword.
With your keyword specified, Yoast SEO will analyze your content against 12 SEO ‘best practices.’ For example, keyword density, readability (using the Flesch Reading Ease test), and number of outbound links are all considered. It also looks at whether your keyword is used in the SEO title, meta description, and first paragraph of your content.
Each best practice is analyzed using a helpful ‘traffic light’ scoring system, helping you to easily identify the areas you can improve. Yoast SEO also displays an overall content score using the same traffic light system — obviously, the aim is green.
While you should be writing for your audience, this functionality guarantees your content won’t sink in the SERPs.
Social Media
Yoast SEO also ships with some useful social media features. For a start, you can tell Google the URLs of eight popular social networks by navigating to SEO > Social. By switching between tabs, you can also integrate your website with four popular social media tools: Facebook Open Graph, Twitter Cards, Pinterest Open Graph, and Google+ Publisher verification.
You’ll find social media features in the content analysis meta box, too. Scroll below the WordPress text editor, then flick across to the Social tab. Here, you can tailor the way your content appears on the social channels — you can edit the title, write a meta description, and also upload a custom image. There are separate tabs for Facebook and Twitter.
XML Sitemaps
Before you can rank well — or rank at all! — your content needs to be indexed. If the search engines aren’t indexing you, no amount of SEO can save you.
Fortunately, Yoast SEO offers built-in XML Sitemap functionality — and it’s excellent, too. Enable XML Sitemaps by navigating to SEO > XML Sitemap and ticking the checkbox.
With the Sitemap functionality activated, Yoast SEO notifies the search engines every time you publish new content. This makes it the quickest way to get new posts indexed. Your images are also indexed, meaning you can show up in Google Image searches, too.
For greater control, Yoast SEO lets you exclude certain post types and taxonomies, should you wish. You can also choose to exclude individual posts by entering the relevant post IDs.
Yoast SEO Premium
In 2013, Yoast released Yoast SEO Premium, available from $69 for a single site.
Having explored the free version’s epic features and functionalities, you may wonder why you’d possibly need to upgrade to Yoast SEO Premium.
The truth is, regarding functionalities, you may not need to.
However, Yoast SEO Premium does offer access to the highly qualified support team. And, with more than half of all queries resolved within 30 minutes, these are the best people for the job.
Obviously, with such a large user base, Yoast couldn’t possibly provide comprehensive support for the free plugin. Therefore, you could consider Yoast SEO Premium primarily as a premium support service. Whether you need to upgrade depends on how much you need Yoast’s support.
To sweeten the deal, though, Yoast SEO Premium does include two useful functionalities:
- Redirects — a quick-and-easy way to fix 404 errors.
- Multiple Focus Keywords — the free plugin only supports one focus keyword.
It also includes 13 video tutorials, helping you to get the most from both the premium and free plugins.
Yoast SEO Extensions
Yoast SEO provides awesome all-round SEO functionality. However, if you want features tailored to your website’s specific needs, consider purchasing one of the four Yoast SEO extensions.
- Video SEO ($69) — get your videos to the top of Google.
- Local SEO ($69) — improve your business’s discoverability in local searches.
- News SEO ($69) — ensure your website is Google News optimized.
- WooCommerce SEO ($59) — get SEO functionality for eCommerce stores.
A bundle, including Yoast SEO Premium and all four extensions, is available for $279 — which represents savings of more than $50.
Introducing All in One SEO Pack
The All in One SEO Pack plugin is Yoast SEO’s great rival. The two plugins really do dominate the SEO plugin market, and both are evenly matched — to the point where it’s almost impossible to discuss one without drawing comparisons with the other (such as in this post!).
All in One SEO Pack was created by developers Michael Torbert and Steve Mortiboy, and launched on the official plugin repository in 2007 — three years before Yoast SEO. It forms part of Semper Plugins’ collection.
The plugin has more than a million active installs and a total of 26 million downloads to date, compared with Yoast’s 25 million.
This means All in One SEO Pack is frequently part of conversations discussing the most popular WordPress plugins of all time. It also has the honor of being, to this day, the most downloaded WordPress plugin ever — although if Yoast can maintain its faster growth rate, it looks set to usurp All in One sometime during 2016.
Settings and Configurations
Rather than splitting the settings across multiple sections and tabs, All in One SEO Pack lists them all in one place — accessed via All in One SEO > General Settings. This means all configurations take place on one screen.
With more settings listed in one place, configurations can feel more daunting than those of Yoast SEO. However, to help you out, each option comes with additional explanations that can be toggled in or out of view.
By working your way through each section, you’ll be able to:
- determine how canonical URLs are handled
- specify the homepage SEO title and description
- configure title styles for each post type
- sync Google Webmaster Tools with your website (also Bing and Pinterest)
- integrate Google+ and Google Analytics
- set default no index and no follow settings for each post type.
Content Analysis
All in One SEO Pack features an SEO meta box, displayed directly below the WordPress text editor.
From here, you can write an SEO title and meta description for your post, and All in One SEO Pack will render how your snippet might appear in the search engines. This is very much in line with what you get with Yoast.
Most notably, however, All in One SEO Pack is missing a content analysis tool — arguably Yoast’s most recognizable and popular feature.
However, with All in One, you’re able to configure a custom canonical URL, ask search engines to no index/no follow the post, and also exclude it from your sitemap. This means you have greater control of the technical details.
Another useful feature: All in One lets you edit SEO titles and meta descriptions in bulk from the All Posts screen. Not quite Yoast’s content analysis feature, but undeniably handy.
Social Media
All in One SEO takes a modular approach, so you can quickly disable any unwanted features. Social Meta is one of these modules, and can be activated via All in One SEO > Feature Manager.
Once it’s activated, you’ll see a new Social Meta menu item, which is where your social media settings are configured — again, all on one screen.
All in One SEO Pack has a more extensive list of social settings than Yoast. Each field has a full explanation, giving you the confidence to configure your website exactly to your liking.
You can associate your website with an unlimited number of social profiles, plus you can connect Facebook Open Graph. The Open Graph section of the settings screen is particularly useful, letting you specify default image sources and dimensions for social posts, giving you full control of how your site appears on Facebook. You can also configure Twitter Cards.
However, all the Facebook Open Graph settings can also be configured on a post-by-post basis using the SEO meta box, via the Social Settings tab. Again, there are loads of settings to play with — you can customize the title/description, upload a custom image/video, and change image dimensions. The meta box also lets you specify a Facebook object type and Twitter card type.
XML Sitemaps
All in One SEO Pack supports XML Sitemap functionality — this module needs activating from the Feature Manager screen, too. Again, this will result in a new menu item: XML Sitemaps.
Once the module’s been activated, All in One SEO Pack creates your XML Sitemap automatically. However, as you may expect by now from All in One, there are plenty of settings for you to tweak.
For a start, you can select which search engines are notified of sitemap updates, or you can specify a notification frequency. You also have full control over which post types and taxonomies make the sitemap — or, specifically, which are excluded.
Further down the screen, you also get to configure the Priorities and Frequencies for your homepage, posts and taxonomies (Yoast doesn’t support this feature). Priorities tell the search engines how important a particular post/page is relative to other internal pages — with values given from 0.0 to 1.0. Frequencies let them know how often a post/page is expected to change — and, therefore, how often each needs to be crawled for updates.
Other Features
As we’ve already mentioned, All in One SEO Pack has a number of modules you can activate/deactivate. In addition to Social Media and XML Sitemap modules, you’ll find:
- robot.txt generator
- performance optimizer
- import/export settings
- bad bot blocker
- robot.txt and .htaccess editor.
All in One SEO Pack Pro
A premium version of the plugin, All in One SEO Pack Pro, is available for $79 — or, if you’re quick enough to take advantage of the current promotion, $39.
It’s worth pointing out that the license grants usage on an unlimited number of websites. Compare this with Yoast, which costs $69 for single use — all the way up to $799 for 100 sites.
Unlike the support-focused Yoast SEO Premium, All in One SEO Pack Pro improves the free version with loads of powerful functionalities, with more frequently added. This includes:
- advanced custom post type options
- category and tag optimization
- robot.txt generator
- front-end editing of .htaccess and robot.txt files
- control of the No Index and No Follow meta tags for individual posts/pages.
Support is also available to premium plugin customers — however, this comes as an additional subscription (plans are available for either $10 a month, $35 biannually, or $49 annually).
Rather disappointingly, a paid subscription is required to receive plugin updates.
The Verdict
When it comes to picking a winner, it really is too close to call. Both are excellent plugins, and either choice will most likely serve you exceptionally well.
Overall, though, Yoast SEO gets my vote — primarily because it ships with a considerably better range of features. In particular, the content analysis tool is perfect for anyone looking to make SEO-friendly tweaks to their posts — a feature that’s sadly missing from All in One SEO Pack. Yoast also, undeniably, comes in the neater, tidier, and altogether more user-friendly packaging.
That said, All in One SEO Pack is, without doubt, an excellent plugin with a lot of firm supporters — furthermore, it offers a wider range of settings in some areas, which folk with either specialist requirements and/or a particularly advanced grip of SEO may find pleasing.
Yoast SEO or All in One SEO Pack? Thoughts?
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I have used both for a long time, and this is really an objective review and a good evaluation of the two, especially if you are using the free version. Thanks, Shaun.
Greetings.
Thank you for supplying such a well written article.
Been using Yoast free SEO for a couple of months now, however it is seriously lacking in the ecommerce SEO department.
Would it be advisable to convert to AIOSEO?
thanks for this great review٫i feel yoast seo premium is better….
but when its comes to yaost seo free and all in one seo٫all in one seo is better
I have used Yoast Best for SEO
I had tried both plugins and I have to conclude that Yoast Seo is better. All in one SEO disorganised most things on my website. Also, If you are a tad bit lazy and you are jogging many stuff at the same time, I would recommend you stay with Yoast. The simplicity is not only perfect but it helps save time. Its quick analysis of content at once is also commendable.