Written by Juan Pedro Catalá
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Search engine optimization is essential nowadays to attract traffic to your website. Optimizing titles, metas and other fields that search engine robots read when crawling pages can go a long way to improving the position your web page appears in search results.
This process of text optimization is made easier on platforms such as WordPress by installing plugins.
In this article, I will analyze the most popular SEO plugins for WordPress and we will see the advantages and disadvantages that each of them offers.
SEO plugins for WordPress analyzed
There are many SEO plugins for WordPress, but we are going to focus on the three most used nowadays:
The plugins have been installed on three different WordPress all with the latest version at the date of writing this article.
What should a good SEO plugin for WordPress do?
Below, I list the options that I consider should have an SEO plugin for WordPress today.
- Editing the “Title” and “Description” of any page, both at the page level and at the general level, establishing patterns by page type.
- Edit meta “robots” of any page, both at the page level and at the general level by page type (post, page, category, tag, archive, author, …
- Generation of
rel=“canonical”andrel=“next/prev”in paginations. - Open Graph and Twitter Cards goal generation and editing at page level.
- Generation of rel=”publisher” and rel=”author” to notify authorship to Google.
- Insertion of Google Analytics tracking code, Google validation codes, Bing.
- XML Sitemap generation, editing of what is included in it and notification to search engines.
- Edition of robots.txt and .htaccess.
- URL rewriting to remove
/category/and/tag/in the URLs of categories and tags. - Permanent redirection to http or https.
WordPress SEO by Yoast vs SEO Ultimate vs All In One SEO Pack
Once we know what a WordPress SEO plugin should have, let’s take a look at the points that Yoast, SEO Ultimate and All In One SEO plugins fulfill.
Title and Description
All three plugins allow you to modify the title and description at page level and set patterns depending on the type of page (entry, page, category, …) except All In One SEO which does not allow you to set patterns for the description.
In addition, SEO Ultimate allows you to massively edit all the titles and descriptions of all pages, posts, categories… on a single page.
Meta robots
In all three plugins it is possible to set the meta robots value by page type or at the individual page or entry level.
Both Yoast and SEO Ultimate, allow you to edit the tag value at the category and tag level, this is not possible with All In One SEO.
Canonical and Next/Prev
All three plugins correctly generate the <link rel="canonical />, which avoids duplicate content problems, and <link rel="next/prev" /> in the paginations.
Open Graph and Twitter Cards
The three plugins generate the Open Graph and Twitter Cards goals and allow modification of the fields at the page level as well as selecting the image to be displayed when sharing on social networks.
Publisher and Author
All three plugins add a field in the users’ profile to add their Google+ account to generate the <link rel="author" />.
Both Yoast and All In One also generate the <link rel="publisher" /> but All In One only on the home page. SEO Ultimate does not add this information, but it can be added in the <head> through an option it has to insert code.
Analytical and verification codes
All three plugins allow the installation of Google and Bing verification codes.
All In One SEO also allows the installation of Google Analytics and in SEO Ultimate it can be added in the section to insert code in the <head>.
Sitemap generation
All In One SEO and Yoast allow the generation of XML sitemaps allowing you to choose which page types are included and which are not. They also send a notification to search engines to let them know that the sitemap has been updated.
Robots.txt and .htaccess editing
SEO Ultimate and Yoast allow editing of both robots.txt and .htaccess, All In One SEO will allow it in future versions of the plugin according to their features page.
URL rewriting
SEO Ultimate allows you to remove /category/ and /tag/ from category and tag URLs.
Yoast only allows to remove /category/ in categories but not /tag/ in tags.
All In One SEO does not allow removing /category/ and /tag/ from URLs.
Redirection to http/https
Both Yoast and SEO Ultimate allow you to select whether you want to perform redirects to force the URL to work via http or https.
All In One SEO does not support this option.
Other options
Yoast and SEO Ultimate have additional options which I list below.
- Yoast
- Removal of RSD, WLW, RSS and short link from the header.
- Option to specify noodp,noydir in the robots meta.
- Option of not indexing paginations.
- Breadcrumb generation.
- Import and export options even from other SEO plugins.
- SEO analysis of each article with recommendations to follow.
- SEO Ultimate
- Massive editing of title, description, robots and social networks.
- Module that allows you to set certain words in the pages to automatically generate a link to another page.
- Monitor of requests that have failed.
- Option to add AddThis or ShareThis.
- Option to remove “stop words” from the slug.
- Option to redirect paging URLs that do not exist.
Final conclusions
All three plugins are quite complete but each one lacks some feature to be fully complete.
Among the three plugins analyzed, Yoast‘s seems to be the most complete of them all, since of all the options we wanted, it only lacks the option to remove /tag/ in the URLs of the tags. It would not be bad if it had an option to insert code in the <head> of the pages as the other plugins have. Of the three plugins is the only one that is translated into Spanish, also generates a report at page level quite complete that can help people who start writing their own blog or editors of a corporate page.
Closely followed by SEO Ultimate, the lack that I miss the most in this plugin is the ability to generate the XML sitemap. Its most outstanding feature, especially for SEO people, is the massive editing of the title, description, robots…
In last place would be All In One SEO, this plugin lacks many options that today I consider important, such as:
- Redirection to force http or https
- Remove /category/ and /tag/ from URLs
- Robots.txt and .htaccess editing
Which do you think is the most complete plugin and why? Tell us about it!
