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WordPress is rather SEO friendly on its own; however, by using an SEO plugin, you would be able to take website optimization to an entirely new level. Plugins offer you more capabilities and options and let you take control over how your content is going to appear in the SERPs and on the social media networks. These plugins also help you produce great content which has high chances of ranking well in the search engine results.

The most comprehensive SEO plugins available in the WordPress repository are the ‘All in One SEO Pack’ and Yoast SEO’. The All in One SEO Pack came out in 2007 and has been one of the most downloaded WordPress plugins. Launched in the year 2010, the Yoast SEO plugin has seen a lot of improvements and now offers a huge range of amazing features.

If you have a WordPress website or are setting up one, we understand your dilemma when it comes to choosing between these two. Both of them are excellent plugins and offer all of the features that you need to get the maximum benefits, complementing your great content strategy. This detailed blog post is here to simplify your doubts about the supremacy of one over the other.

Content Optimization

Content optimization is undoubtedly one of the most important parts of SEO. Let us see which one performs better here.

Yoast SEO – The Yoast SEO has a meta box of its own towards the bottom of the WP Editor. This helps in controlling how your content is going to appear in the SERP’s. With this, you also get the chance to create a snippet with the link as well as Meta description and title of your own. It also has a content analysis feature which analyses your content for the best SEO practices.

All in One SEO Pack – This plugin enables you to edit the title and meta description and also has an option that allows disabling indexing, setting up canonical URL’s and much more. You would also get the chance to attach your own pictures and descriptions for the purpose of sharing on social media sites if you activate the social media Add-on. However, this plugin doesn’t have the content analysis tool.

Verdict – Both of these plugins work on excellently to help you edit how your site appears in the search engine results. But, the All in One SEO doesn’t have the content analysis tool and that makes the Yoast SEO a bit better.

Ease of Installation and Setup

The All in One SEO Pack and Yoast SEO can easily be found in the WordPress.org Plugin Repository. However, it does take up a lot of practice and training so as to understand and implement the SEO concepts into a website. Here, we will see as to how easy it is to setup and configure the plugin for a WordPress site owner who may or may not be a newbie.

All in One SEO Pack – Once you have installed and activated the plugin, you would be able to find the menu item right below the dashboard. Most of the configurations are similar to that of Yoast which means that the settings are quite extensive. However, unlike Yoast, they are all clubbed in together on the same page with separate tabs. This makes it a bit more confusing for the beginner to find things.

Yoast SEO – After installing and activating the plugin, you would see an option that gives you a tour of the different settings that are available. The setting section of this plugin is divided neatly into pages wherein each of the pages has different tabs for each of the settings. This makes it easier for the user to understand and setup this plugin on their site.

Verdict - Undoubtedly both of the plugins has a lot of options, and both of them try their best to simplify things for a user. All in One SEO Pack would be great for a beginner. However, Yoast SEO seems to remain unbeatable for the advanced SEO users with their tabbed settings and multi-pages.

XML Sitemaps

The sitemaps are a tool which is used for getting your content indexed appropriately. They essentially provide a map of your site which tells the search engine as to how to index it and provide this information to the search engines.

Yoast SEO – Yoast SEO has its own menu, especially for the XML sitemaps. They are basically a default option and are created automatically and also get updated whenever new content is introduced. You can have a look at the sitemaps in the settings section and decide the kind of post that you want to include.

All in One SEO Pack – This plugin doesn’t really have XML sitemaps as a default feature, and you would require activating it from the Feature Manager. This would create a Sitemap automatically and provide you with an extra configuration menu. With this, you can set decide the parts of the content you want to be included, set which search engines are to be notified and do several other things.

Verdict - As is evident, both of these plugins offer the feature of XML sitemap however they handle it differently. Yoast SEO has a default feature while the All in One SEO Pack has a lot of other options and features on offer.

Other Features

On Page SEO is a rather comprehensive process and therefore, both of these plugins offer so many additional features and tools rather than just the meta tags. All these features provide an all-in-one solution and thereby eliminate the need to install several plugins.

Yoast SEO

This plugin has been loved by so many people. With this plugin, other than the above-mentioned ones, you get a lot more features and extensions like multiple focus keywords; redirect manager, open graph Meta tags, export/import SEO data, breadcrumb navigation, social previews, built-in robots.txt and .htaccess editor.

All in One SEO Pack

This plugin undoubtedly does come with a lot of features. However, not all of them are activated by default. You would need to activate them at the Features Manager in order to activate them. A few of its features are file editor, performance manager, advanced WooCommerce support, advanced Google analytics support, import and export SEO data, robots.txt, bad bot blocker and SEO for custom taxonomies.

Conclusion

Both of these plugins offer quite a similar set of features and tools. Also, both of these plugins have their own set of benefits and disadvantages. It is entirely up to you to decide which one you are going to use. You can take all of the above things into account and decide which one is the best plugin for you. Do let us know which one is your favorite SEO plugin by dropping a comment below.

This has been a guest blog post by Kiera Hayes. All opinions represented in this post are entirely the author's and not indicative of the opinions or suggestions of RocketTheme or the RocketTheme team. Kiera Hayes is a passionate Blogger and Web Developer. She enjoys reading and writing articles whenever she gets time from her work.

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