SEO has moved on leaps and bounds since old-school tactics such as keyword stuffing and spammy link building led to search engine domination. Although the finer SEO strategies have changed, there remains one underlying constant: Proper on-site optimization is the solid foundation on which all of your SEO efforts should be built.
Fortunately, the WordPress core ships with some useful built-in functionalities for optimizing your site, including meta tags, neat and tidy navigation links, and optimized permalinks.
If you’re serious about ranking your website at the top of Google, though, you’ll almost certainly want a little more. As ever, the best strategy with WordPress is to install a dedicated plugin with purpose-built functionalities — in this case, a search engine optimization plugin.
With SEO as important today as ever, there are plenty of SEO plugins out there — so which should you choose? To help answer this question, we’re pitting two of the very best (not to mention the most popular) SEO plugins against each other: Yoast SEO (formerly known as ‘WordPress SEO by Yoast’) versus All in One SEO Pack.
To allow for a more in-depth discussion, we’ll be reviewing each plugin’s features in four areas, including:
- overall settings and configurations
- on-page content analysis
- social media
- XML sitemaps.
First up, Yoast.