Are you looking for the best WordPress SEO plugin? If you are, then you have likely narrowed your choice down to the two most popular WordPress SEO plugins: Yoast SEO and All in One SEO Plugin. Both of these plugins do a pretty good job of making your blog search engine friendly. But today we are here to write a review of All in one SEO plugin. This is one of the best SEO plugin for blogs. We will discuss features and how to use All in One SEO plugin to make your blog SEO optimized.
What is All in one SEO plugin all about?
All in One SEO Pack helps to optimize your WordPress site for SEO. It’s easy and works out of the box for beginners, and has advanced features and an API for developers. This plugin is streamlined for some best practices for WordPress SEO.
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.
My Recommendation
After writing the features and usage All in one SEO plugin prove in all the aspects. All in one SEO plugin is 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. We hope that you like this review article. For any query please feel free to comment below.
