All In One SEO vs Yoast SEO vs Premium SEO (Compared)

All In One SEO vs Yoast SEO vs Premium SEO Pack. Which one to use? Which one is best? It’s true that WordPress is a very search engine friendly out of the box.

The core version of WordPress offers basic SEO functionality such as pretty permalink structures, the ability to change the post slug and capacity to change your website title and description.

Depending on the theme you are using you may also have some additional options for SEO. But still, when starting your WordPress powered website, it is still good to have some WordPress SEO plugin installed and activated.

SEO plugins let your take site optimization a few steps further, specifically on-page SEO. They do so by giving you more control over how your content will appear in search engine results and on social networks.

WordPress search engine optimization plugin can help you in producing optimized content that is much more likely to rank high by giving you that extra bump.

If you want to push your site on first pages in Google search results, search engine optimization (SEO) is a significant part of site’s success. Organic traffic is still one of the most important channels for bringing traffic to your website traffic.

 

All In One SEO vs Yoast SEO vs Premium SEO

 

NOTE: Please note that this comparison only looks at the features on paper as reported by plugin’s developers. It does not and can not tell you if or how well a certain SEO plugin will work for you.

Such a verdict would depend on too many variables like server setup and personal preference. I have decided to stick to the hard facts for this comparison between All In One SEO vs Yoast SEO vs Premium SEO plugin.

Also as times goes and plugin get updates many new features are added or deprecated. This means above comparison table may be inaccurate. For current options and settings, please visit official sales page for each plugin.

If you are interested how Yoast SEO compares to Rank Math free SEO plugin be sure to check my post comparison.

 

UPDATE: I have also compared Yoast SEO and All In One SEO with SEOPress plugin.

 

WordPress SEO Plugins

There are many SEO plugins for WordPress. By far the two most popular options are Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) and All-in-One SEO Pack.

Both of them have free versions and do an excellent job at making WordPress websites search engine friendly. Which one should you pick? Both Yoast SEO and All-in-One SEO Pack have more than one million active installs.

The decision between Yoast SEO and All-in-One SEO is one that almost every WordPresse user comes to face at some point.

 

Frequent Questions About SEO

1. Is WordPress search engine optimized out of the box?

Out of the box, WordPress is a pretty well-optimized system. Though WordPress is search engine friendly, you will still need to do some manual SEO work for best results.

2. Is it enough just to install SEO plugin?

No WordPress plugin can cover all elements of SEO. Configuring your SEO plugin corectly is a step in the right direction. The big picture is a lot more complex and comprehensive.

3. How do I choose the best WordPress SEO plugin for my website?

There are two SEO plugins that distinguish themselves from the rest. They are All In One SEO Pack and WordPress SEO by Yoast.

4. Can free WordPress themes hurt my SEO?

A great benefit of WordPress is the huge array of free themes available. Many are harmless and are great choices for any website or blog. Badly optimized themes, however, can hurt your SEO.

 

All In One SEO or Yoast SEO or Premium SEO Pack

Both Yoast SEO and All In One SEO plugin have a free version. If looking to choose All In One SEO vs Yoast SEO based on features only in their free plugin version (Premium SEO doesn’t have a free version), they basically have same options.

I recommend if going with their free version, to choose Yoast SEO. I tried both and would pick Yoast SEO as it has better page analysis feature.

 

Yoast SEO WordPress Plugin

Probably the most popular and well-known search engine optimization plugin for WordPress. It was created by Joost de Valk and his team and became very popular in the community.

It hit the official WordPress repository in October 2010. At the time, it was known as WordPress SEO by Yoast or WordPress SEO. In July 2015, the plugin was rebranded as Yoast SEO which is the same name used till this day.

It has free and premium (paid) version. The free version is enough and does the job for most people. Yoast SEO plugin takes care of all the technical optimization and helps you write better content.

Using the snippet preview, you can see a rendering of what your post or page will look like in the search results, whether your title is too long or too short, and whether your meta description makes sense in the context of a search result.

 

 

The Yoast SEO plugins Page Analysis functionality checks simple things you could forget to do. It checks if you have images in your post and whether they have an alt tag containing the focus keyword for that post.

It also checks if your posts are long enough, whether you’ve added a meta description and if that meta description contains your focus keyword if you’ve used any subheadings within your post, etc.

 

Yoast SEO Features

Yoast SEO has couple sections in its menu (free version): Dashboard, Titles & metas, Social, XML sitemaps, Permalinks, Internal links, RSS, Import & Export, Edit files, Description and Title Editor.

Some of them have sub-sections delimited by tabs (note – updated version have things little different now).

In “Dashboard” tab you can take the plugin tour and find out some basic information, reset the settings to default or verify your site for Alexa, Bing, Google Webmaster tools, Pinterest or Yandex.

“Titles & Metas” tab allows you to edit meta tags for your homepage, posts, pages, custom posts and more. From here, you can block individual pages from Google index with a “noindex” meta tag, manage sitewide links, clean up and lot more.

In “Social” tab you can integrate your site with Facebook, Twitter or Google. XML Sitemaps tab is for sitemap functionality and is recommended as it will help search engines to crawl your site content.

In “Permalinks” tab you can manage your permalink settings and edit some parameters like enforce a trailing slash on category URLs, remove stop words from slugs, manage some redirects and canonical settings.

“Internal links” tab is useful if you want to activate breadcrumbs on your site and manage their separators and anchor text.

“RSS” feature automatically adds content to your RSS. It’s meant to add links back to your blog and your blog posts, so scrapers will automatically add these links too, helping search engines identify you as the source of the content.

 

Don’t worry if you have used another SEO plugin and want to start using WordPress SEO by Yoast. You can easily import all the data with a simple click in “Import and Export” tab.

You can also export your current settings into a .zip file and import it later if needed. “Edit files” allows you to edit your robots.tx file and include all the links that you want to block from search engines’ results.

The best part of WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin is page analysis option. When creating a new post, you will have new options below post content. Those settings are choosing focus keyword, meta description, meta keywords, etc.

 

 

It will also suggest changes in your post content which could help SEO performance of your post and let you know how to improve your content. It is a great feature to have.

Premium Features

• Redirect Manager  – Allows you to create and manage redirects from within your WordPress website dashboard.
• Multiple focus keywords – With this feature, you can optimize a post for more than one focus keyword.
• Social previews – You can check what your Facebook or Twitter post will look like when you share your post.
• Internal linking – Add related links to other articles from within the post editor. This way you can add links to relevant articles on the fly instead of having to search for them manually.
• Insights – Check the readability and SEO-friendliness of your text. Insights also show you the five words or word combinations that appear most often in your text.
• Premium support – Gives you access to support team. You can email them your questions about usage of the plugin or your problems in setting it up.

Yoast SEO provides impressive all-round SEO functionality. However, if you want features tailored to your website’s specific needs, consider purchasing one of the 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 your WooCommerce stores.

A bundle, including Yoast SEO Premium and all four extensions, is available for $279.

 

Yoast SEO Pros & Cons

Yoast SEO free version has all you need for pushing your site content up in search rankings. I use Yoast SEO on most of my sites for a long time. It is regularly updated, and community is big which means you can easily find suggestions, tips and guides to get the most out of the plugin.

Premium version comes with some extra options which most can be solved utilizing other free plugins. Unfortunately, purchasing premium version will not get you extensions.

If you want more options like SEO news or WooCommerce extra optimization, you will need to buy an extension. As I am aware, you don’t need premium Yoast SEO to be able to use extensions.

 

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All In One SEO Pack

Another well-known and widely used WordPress SEO plugin. All in One SEO Pack is created by Michael Torbert of Semper Fi Web Design. It is popular WordPress plugin for managing the search engine optimization of website or blog.

 

 

All in One SEO Pack is the downloaded over 18 million times to this date. It has free and paid version. The free version can be found on wordpress.org plugin directory.

Paid version is 79$ per year but once bought it can be used on an unlimited number of your sites. The free version will mostly be enough for beginners as it has all necessary settings.

It is a powerful plugin with lots of features and options. Visit All in One SEO » General Settings after installing to configure the global settings for the plugin. All in One SEO Pack features an SEO meta box, displayed directly below the WordPress, text editor.

From there, 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 but All in One SEO is missing a content analysis tool which is Yoast’s most recognizable and popular feature.

All in One SEO takes a modular approach, so you can quickly disable any unwanted features (Video Sitemap comes with paid versions, and Image SEO module is coming soon).

 

 

The most significant difference between free and paid version is in additional features. Like in WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast, support for bigger problems with the plugin is possible in paid version.

 

All In One SEO Features

By default, All in One SEO has three main sections: “General Settings,” “Performance” ”.and “Feature Manag.” Additional features are added after activating modules in feature manager section. The “General Settings” tab is most important, and that is a place where all main settings are configured.

You will find practically all the features and settings, including meta tags, keyword settings, title settings, home page settings, webmaster verification, noindex settings, display settings and more.

Each section has a “help” button that explains what each option does. You can also link your Bing and Google webmaster tools accounts, as well as add your Google analytics for tracking and Pinterest. Here you can also block individual pages from Google index with “noindex” meta tag.

 

 

 

In “Performance” you can view some technical parameters of your system like active plugins and memory limit. You can adjust some of its values to achieve better performance.

In “Feature Manager” you will find some extra functionalities that can be activated and deactivated.

These are: XML sitemaps (to generate and manage your sitemaps), Social meta (to edit your parameters for social media sharing), Performance (to view your system status), Robots.txt to generate and validate robots.txt, Importer and Exporter to import or export all in one SEO pack settings, File Editor to edit .htacces and tune site.

Social Meta menu which is where your social media settings are configured and have a more extensive list of social settings than Yoast.

XML Sitemaps menu creates your XML Sitemap automatically. 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

 

Some of All In One SEO Pack Features:

 

All-in-One SEO Pack also comes with additional features that can be activated in the Feature Manager:

• Robots.txt Editor – Lets you edit the robots.txt file from the backend.
• File Editor – From here, you can manually edit both robots.txt and .htaccess.
• Import/Export – Import and export your settings to easily share your configuration with other sites.
• Bad Bot Blocker – Prevent bad search spiders from slowing down your site.
• Video Sitemap (in paid version) – Create and manage your Video Sitemap using this feature and submit your Video Sitemap to Google, Bing/Yahoo and Ask.com.

 

Both plugins are capable and will help you improve your search engine presence. The free version of WordPress SEO offers slightly better options than the free version of All in One SEO Pack.

But when checking their paid versions, I would give my vote to All in One SEO Pack because it is cheaper ($79) and can be use on an unlimited number of your site while.

With Yoast single site license is $69 and if you want to use on more than one site, you will need to pay more.

I personally use WordPress SEO free version on my websites. However, I can see why others prefer the simpler approach that All in One SEO Pack adopts in many areas. That is why I recommend trying out both of these plugins and seeing which is best for your business and needs.

 

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Premium SEO Pack

Premium SEO Pack is another well-known search engine optimization plugin that has complete SEO feature such as optimize the image, social sharing, rich snippet, local SEO, SERP position and monitor everything.

It has more features/modules included than Yoast SEO and All In One SEO combined. But does that make it the best?

 

 

This is a high-quality, comprehensive SEO plugin that offers you everything which you may need to optimize your site. Premium version is packed with various extras to take SEO optimization step further.

Premium SEO Pack contains all the features that you would expect to find in dozens of different WordPress plugins, plus it includes unique features that you just cannot find anywhere else. It costs 44$ on Codecanyon, and I find it to be a great investment.

It also comes in free version like WordPress SEO by Yoast and All In One SEO Pack, but its free version was last updated three years ago, so I count that as it has no free version.

This plugin will help you to improve the internal link building, help you to optimize the images, will handle the rich snippet functionality, manage 301 redirections, etc.

This plugin also handles the on-page optimization and can mass optimize your posts if required. Title & meta, Google Analytics, 404 pages, backlink builder, are some of the other highlights of this plugin.

 

Premium SEO Pack Overview

After activating Premium SEO, you will have couple main tabs. Those are Dashboard, Monitorize, On page optimization, Of page optimization, Advanced Setup, and Plugin settings.

You can activate modules you wish to keep and deactivate ones you don’t need. If you are stuck or don’t understand what each module does, there is HELP icon on the right for each module.

 

 

Here are main modules in Premium SEO Pack :

1. Backlink Builder module makes adding your website to website directories lot easier. But don’t be fooled. It is not completely automatic as human presence is still needed.
2. Google Analytics module provides page visit statistics from your WordPress admin site. No need to visit google analytics page.
3. With Link Builder you can put internal link building on autopilot. You create a list of keywords and links are automatically added.
4. W3C Validator module allows you to mass check the markup (HTML, XHTML, …) of your pages/posts/custom taxonomies.
5. Capabilities module lets you give different kind of permissions to different kind of user groups like editor or author.
6. 301 Link Redirect will save you troubles of manually configuring redirects in .htacces file. It is very useful for any permalink change.
7. Social Stats tab will show how many times were your website pages shared on social sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Digg etc.
8. Facebook Planner module allows you to post your content to Facebook.
9. Files Edit is intended for editing robots.txt and .htaccess file. You can link your content to Google+ with Google Authorship module.
10. Page Speed Insights will show website page speed of each page or post on mobile devices or desktop using Google page speed. If you want to rank well locally, like for your town or particular country, then Local SEO module will be very useful.
11. With Monitor 404 you can see what URLs are referring visitors to 404 pages, how many hits it had and redirect them to another page.
12. Mass Optimization module is used for automatic seo optimization all pages and posts. I still recommend manually doing for each post or page as it gives better results.
13. SEO Friendly Images module will automatically update all images with proper ALT and Title Attributes. If they don’t have ALT setup, the SEO Friendly Images will add them according to the options you set.
14. SERP module will allow you to add focus keywords and track their search engine results ranking.
15. The Sitemap is generated automatically, and you can submit it to Google or Bing right from the dashboard. You can choose what to include, and if you want to add Images as well. It also has Video sitemap.
16. One of useful modules is Smushit. If you use Smushit plugin or any other image optimization plugin, then this will be for you. No need for additional plugins as Premium SEO Pack already consist it.
17. Title and Meta Format is used for setting custom page titles, meta descriptions, meta keywords, meta robots and social meta using defined format tags for Homepage, Posts, Pages, Categories, Tags, Custom Taxonomies, Archives, Authors, Search, 404 Pages and Pagination.

 

Other WordPress SEO Plugin Alternatives

If mentioned plugins for some reason didn’t make an impression on you, here are some other WordPress SEO plugins to consider:

SEOPressor

Very powerful plugin to improve organic traffic to your site. This plugin offers many useful features which helps you to optimize your blog content. It comes with a built-in keyword research tool which allows you to find long tail keywords related to your topic and use those while writing your content.

Once you are done with the post, it understands the overall on page SEO strength of the article and provides you a score based on the analysis. This plugin also helps you to optimize the images on the page by checking if all the images have required tags or ant and suggest you accordingly.

SEOPressor helps you to manage the internal linking as it provides you an option to assign link depending on particular keyword or phrase. For more info you can check SEOPressor Connect review.

 

SEO by SQUIRRLY

Squirrly SEO plugin helps you to create content that is human as well as search bot friendly. It will help you to get better ranking in search results and keep your users engaged. With this plugin, you can get SEO related stats, get weekly SEO audits and find the best keywords for your site to get more traffic.

This plugin will tell you if your content is up to the mark regarding SEO. The squirrly plugin helps you by providing you real time advice to optimize your articles while you are writing or editing them.

 

SEOPress Pro

SEOPress is a newcomer, but don’t let that scare you. It is one of the best Yoast alternative on the market.

Unlike Yoast, SEOPress will not slow your website down. SEOPress does not nickel and dime you to death like Yoast does, everything is included in the Pro version and you can install it on unlimited websites. For more info you can check SEOPress Pro review.

 

Rank Math

Rank Math is a WordPress plugin for SEO that helps a website to attain a good SEO ranking and standard. Rank Math helps to understand what is wrong with particular keyword which you are trying to rank for in your web page content.

Rank Math primarily focuses on On page SEO. It takes care of most of the basic and advanced on page SEO techniques. As you start writing content for your web page or a log, you are offered an option to insert your targeted keyword in it.

After the keyword insertion, your content would be checked and Rank Math will highlight which things are right and where improvements are required. For more info you can check Rank Math review.

 

All In One SEO vs Yoast SEO vs Premium SEO Final Words

If you are looking for free WordPress SEO plugin, then the best choice would be WordPress SEO by Yoast or SEOPress. It is by far best free WordPress SEO plugin which I use on most of my sites.

If you are willing to pay for SEO plugin, then you could try Premium SEO Pack or All In One SEO Pack. Before deciding which plugin(s) to use, here are some important questions to address:

• Compatibility: Is the plugin compatible with other plugins on my site? Will it continue to be compliant in the future?
• Support: Will there be adequate support for the plugin from the developers, or the community? Check out support forums, reviews and feedback from long-term users.
• Usage/Popularity: How popular is the plugin? Many downloads is an indication of widespread use, and a community of experienced users who can offer you ideas or help troubleshoot problems.
• Future Development: Buying themes and plugins from reputed vendors and Elite providers on marketplaces like ThemeForest and Codecanyon is safer than trying out one from an unknown provider without a track record.

This concludes All In One SEO vs Yoast SEO vs Premium SEO comparison. Let me know what do you think about mentioned plugins and which SEO plugin do you use.