I believe most of us have established in our minds that WordPress is probably the best CMS there is. That’s correct as well. It is an open source project with great community support. There are already a number of quality plugins readily available and hundreds of them are in development phase right now.

Most of these plugins are centered around the terrific SEO capabilities of WordPress as a platform. Let’s refresh the definition of SEO first.

For beginners, SEO is the art of making alteration and slight technical changes to ensure that your website ranks well in search engines. You see, it is the primary job of the search engines to show the highest quality webpages in search results.

With that said, SEO is further divided into two categories, Off page and On page optimization. While off page optimization is mostly to do with the number of links (which are seen as the number of votes by search engines), the on page optimization is more to do with the website itself.

When going for on page SEO, you optimize everything on your website itself. Most of it can be successfully done by SEO plugins that are available. And that is what we’re going to talk about today.

SEO Plugins for WordPress

As mentioned, the WordPress community has thousands of plugins at their disposal. This works both in favor and against their users. While there is no dearth for plugins, how do you decide which one suits your need?

And that’s a difficult decision to make. This is exactly what this post will help you with. Even if there are multiple plugins for the similar tasks, we’ll help you with a roadmap to find out which one is the best for you.

Just for the sake of understanding what works for you and what doesn’t, we’re going to discuss 2 very important plugins today. I’m sure you’ve already heard about Yoast SEO and All in One SEO plugin. The reason we picked these two is because choosing one of them is a must for a new WordPress website. Also, you cannot go wrong with either one. Although, by the end of the post we’ll summarize which one is perfect for you.

Note: Before we begin, I must mention that both of these plugins are already used by thousands  millions of people and have many new features they boast of. In fact, you cannot go wrong with either one of them. Yet, as a new WordPress website owner, there are certain differences that you might notice. The purpose of this post is to highlight those differences and let you choose the plugin which is slightly better than the other one.

Also, there are many more SEO Plugins, but we are going to compare only the 2 best ones.

#1 Ease of use

Yoast – To be honest, Yoast is the better designed out of the two. It is easy to understand without too many complex options. Every bit of information that you put in Yoast, is well laid out. The text boxes are easy to fill. The sections are well separated. We use Yoast at Rohitink.com too.

All in One – All in one is a terrific plugin which is also easy to use, yet it appears old and to classical with lots of options. Sometimes the interface could get a little overwhelming for new users. You can easily manage the features that you want to use and the ones you want to discard. For some people, this is an enhancement that they love, compared to Yoast, which does not have a similar feature.

# 2 Daily usage

Yoast – If you’re looking to only optimize the On-page SEO of your blog posts, this is the plugin for you. It can easily show you how your titles and descriptions look on Google search results. There is an option to work on a focus keyword to correctly optimize the whole page. Everything related to your On page SEO is expressed in a very color-coded way. The interface and the usability are excellent. You would love to use it on a daily basis.

All in One – As compared to Yoast, this one seems a little blank. Mind you, it does everything correctly and still is a powerhouse. In fact, some people like the bare bone structure of All in One plugin. So if you are an experienced SEO professional, this could really work well for you.

# 3 Other important features

Yoast only- There are certain features that only Yoast can boast (wait that rhymes!). For example, the option to clean up the permanent links. You can also add content to the RSS feed (with further advance features). There are other advanced benefits as well that you can explore once you start using the plugin. Yoast also gives you more control (only slightly) over the XML sitemaps as compared to All in One plugin.

All in One only – Likewise, All-in-one offers amazing features whereas you can decide not to deal with certain unwanted bots. You can decide to block them. There are other advanced features revolving around advanced SEO performance that you can try out once you start using it.

Features both of them have

• You can easily connect to the Google search console.
• It’s not too difficult to access the .htaccess and robots.txt Files.
• If you are planning to change the SEO plugin, migration becomes a big hassle. But not with these two. Both of these offer it as a functionality.
• They do offer almost the similar functionalities for social platforms as well. Both of them provide the same social media settings.

Again, when you dig deep into it, you might notice certain differences. However, a beginner would hardly notice the difference

# 4 Plugin support

Yoast – The general settings offered are for beginners and not at all complex. Also, you can easily view a detailed feature explainer video near every tab. This further decreases the chances for any confusion the user could potentially have. There is also an option for premium support. Yoast has Premium Addons for Ecommerce Stores and Local Businesses.

May websites go for non-seo plugins for optimizing the page SEO. For Example, PhenqSale.com uses a WP Review Plugin on their site, which an affiliate website to sell a popular weight loss pill. This review plugin helps them show up in Google search results with Beautiful star rating appearing below their title, which further boosts their SERP.

All in One – All-in-one is slightly more complex to use at times. In case of any confusion, they do offer plugin support without any charge. Sometimes the support is late to respond but according to general user feedback it works in most cases.

So, the verdict is. . .

Now that we have all the information to compare, let’s quickly come to a conclusion. We’ll decide right now which one of these plugins is more suited to your needs. I know it is difficult to generalize the situation for each one of you, but trust me we have enough data to try.

• If you’re looking for maximum options, customizations, and control over your SEO plugin, All in one SEO is designed just for you. The interface is not as great as Yoast, yet it delivers most of the times. If you know what you’re doing this is the plugin for you.
• If you’re looking for the simplest (and the most rocking) SEO plugin for a beginner who could be a non-technical person, the answer would be Yoast. Not only everything is simple to use, the plugin can help you positively impact your On page SEO right out of the box. You can never go wrong with Yoast.

Our recommendation

If you’ve reached this far in the article, I believe you can understand that our recommendation would be Yoast SEO plug-in. This is a picture perfect plugin that can really boost the efficiency of your website. The best part is the team behind the software is always on top of things and do sort out their problems at a very fast rate. The plugin is also bug-free.

Although, it is not a race and All in One is not the loser here. Yet, it lags little behind Yoast, especially for beginners. But then, sometimes it just boils down to personal choice. I would recommend that you can try both of them and do let us know in comments about your views.