All in One SEO Pack vs Yoast SEO: Which one to choose?

When you create a WordPress website, one of the first things to consider is SEO. WordPress offers a variety of SEO plugins, including the most popular All in one SEO pack and Yoast SEO.

All in one SEO pack is one of the oldest WordPress SEO plugins. More than two million users take advantage of it every day.

Yoast SEO is probably the most popular plugin. It has more than 5 million active users. While these two tools have similar features, there are a few important differences.

Both plugins can do an excellent job helping you keep your SEO efforts at the highest level. However, which one is best for you? In this article, you’ll learn all about both options and figure out which one suits your website the best.

All-in-one SEO vs Yoast SEO: The similarities

Regardless of which purpose you use the website for, from a blog to an e-store, SEO is an integral part of its popularity.

SEO plugins like all in one SEO pack and Yoast SEO are designed to simplify your search engine optimization efforts. Both of them focus on helping your website look highly appealing in the eyes of search engine crawlers.

Both plugins have such functionality as:

• Creating XML sitemaps
• Working with robots.txt
• Creating Meta descriptions
• Adjusting SEO titles
• Assisting with social integrations

It’s worth noting that no matter how good and helpful SEO plugins are, they are merely tools to help you with your optimization efforts. Unlike other SEO tools that do keyword research or SEO analytics, plugins simply help you structure your website and content properly.

None of the plugins can help you create content or make your website more intuitive. They simply give you the right tools to do it.

Yoast SEO vs All in One SEO Pack: Yoast SEO overview

Let’s start with reviewing the Yoast SEO plugin. This tool comes with a variety of website optimization features, including content analysis, meta information management, duplicate content management, XML sitemaps, social integrations, rich snippets, and a lot more.

Content

The main benefit of the Yoast SEO plugin is assistance with content writing. After installing the tool, you can see a Yoast SEO meta box when editing a post. You can use it to add a meta title and description to the post as well as choose a focus keyword.

Once you choose the keyword (or several keywords), the plugin starts analyzing your content and gives it an SEO score. After that, it offers recommendations for content improvement.

Additionally, Yoast SEO provides a readability score of your content. It can help you adjust the post to suit certain target audiences.

Indexing

In some cases, you may want to hide certain pages from the search engine crawlers so they don’t index them. Yoast SEO allows you to mark pages you don’t want to be indexed so they remain hidden from the search engines.

The plugin adds canonical link elements so search engines understand which pages you don’t want to be indexed.

XML sitemaps

Creating a comprehensive XML sitemap is integral for the quick ranking of your website. Yoast SEO generates XML sitemaps automatically and submits them to the search engines.

Editing Robots.txt and .htaccess files

In some cases, you may need to edit or review your .htaccess or robots.txt files. They are located in the website’s root directory so you’d have to connect to the FTP client to work with them.

Yoast SEO offers a feature that allows you to access these files. You can also edit them without leaving the WordPress dashboard.

Page preview

Yoast SEO offers social previews, which allow you to see how the page or post looks when it’s shared on social media (Facebook and Twitter). You can upload a custom image so it appears nice when shared on the networks.

Internal linking suggestions

Internal linking is an essential part of SEO. It can also take a while to find the right post to create an internal link to. Yoast SEO gives you internal link suggestions. It can be an extremely handy feature especially if you aren’t the only one posting content on the website.

Price

The basic version of the Yoast SEO plugin is free. Depending on the goal of your website, you may never need the premium paid version of this plugin. The downside of using the free plugin is the lack of support.

However, you can find extensive documentation to troubleshoot your work. Meanwhile, WordPress has a formidable community where you can find answers. Additionally, the plugin offers on-screen instructions.

If you’d like to purchase a premium version, it costs $89. It also comes with premium support.

All in One SEO Pack vs Yoast: All in One SEO Pack overview

All in one SEO pack has been around for almost 12 years. It was downloaded over 50 million times. The success of this plugin with WordPress users is obvious. Here are a few things to consider when choosing all in one SEO vs Yoast SEO plugin.

Simple interface

All in one SEO pack is designed for all types of users, from newbies to SEO experts. Once you install it, the tool is ready for use without any special settings. The plugin is geared for intuitive use.

Even if you are just starting your path to SEO, you don’t have to leaf through help pages. The majority of features offered by the All in one SEO pack are readily available and straightforward.

Title settings

This feature is similar to Yoast’s Metadata settings. You can work on the title structure to make sure your pages are optimized for search engine crawling. You can also integrate with advanced options to display custom fields as variables in your title.

Content optimization

The plugin allows you to optimize content to ensure the best quality for search engine optimization.

You get recommendations about your metadata, such as titles and descriptions. After you set the targeted keywords, the program lets you know how well the content is optimized for the keyword.

The preview snippet gives you an idea of what meta titles and descriptions of your post look like in advance.

You can also take advantage of the “social settings” tab in case you want to create different titles and descriptions for social media.

Meta tags

The plugin generates meta tags in case you need them. Meta tags are important to defining how your website appears on search engine results pages. Besides title tags and meta descriptions, you may need:

• Viewport tag – impacts the way your content appears on mobile devices
• Robots – used to indicate “noindex” or “nofollow” posts.
• Hreflang – points the search engine to the language or country you want to display the content to.
• Canonical – specify the primary version of the page.
• Content type – shows how the page is rendered in the browser.

XML sitemap

Just like Yoast SEO, this plugin allows you to generate XML sitemaps and submit them to the search engines automatically. It also helps submit image XML sitemaps to improve your image SEO efforts.

Unlike Yoast SEO, this plugin has a built-in XML sitemaps feature. A sitemap automatically notifies the search engines whenever you make updates to the website like publishing a new article.

Advanced features

Advanced SEO users can take advantage of such advanced all in one SEO pack features like:

• Editing robots.txt files to specify which parts of the website should be crawled by search engine spiders.
• Editing .htaccess files
• Import or export all in one SEO pack settings
• Support for Schema.org and Google Knowledge graph

Price

All in one SEO pack has a free version, which the majority of users takes advantage of. The premium version (All In One SEO Pack Pro) gives you such options as:

• Advanced support
• SEO for categories, tags, and custom taxonomies
• Access to video SEO module and screencasts
• Access to premium support forums
• Access to the knowledge center

The premium version costs between $136 and $1,118 per year (depending on the type of license) with discounts available for the first year of use.

Yoast SEO vs All In One SEO: Comparison

Yoast vs All in One SEO: Conclusion

Both plugins are highly efficient for SEO on WordPress websites. They are both popular among users. All in one pack SEO is a simpler version of Yoast SEO. It can be an excellent solution for beginners with its intuitive interface and various important features.

Yoast SEO is not as easy to set up and use as All in one SEO pack. However, it has more analytical features and can be an excellent choice for SEO experts.