I have seen a number of arguments about what is the best SEO plugin for WordPress to use. Should you use All-In-One or Yoast? What is best for a beginner and should you change plugins? In this review, I will discuss these questions offering my thoughts and suggestions. We will look in detail at Yoast and All-In-One (AIO) SEO plugins for your WordPress site, highlighting the pros and cons.
Yoast Plugin
Let us look at the Yoast Plugin and see what challenges people face. One of the frequent issues observed with many users of this plugin is it offers a menu of guidelines on the readability of the content within a WordPress blog post. Along with suggestions of SEO to be implemented for what is written within the content.
In addition, it also gives a numeric rating and informs you if the post you have written has a quality user experience with being easy to read and if it is suitable for SEO.
On the surface, this all seems like really good bonus points for the plugin in terms of its usefulness and being helpful to the publisher or blogger.
However, I would like to point out that this can be a negative thing as it means you are being distracted and unnecessarily caught up in debates about if their SEO rating the plugin provides for every post they produce is of concern if it highlights issues.
It will mean that the blogger will be getting mislead and focused on being worried about all the statistics the Yoast plugin is revealing rather than just focusing on writing great content.
When you are starting out in the blogging world with your new website the last thing you should be concerned about is measuring statistics about traffic, ranking and SEO. What is important especially with a brand new website is just focusing on building out excellent content that is fantastic for the internet community.
Once you have got a lot of unique and awesome content and it is naturally ranking in the search engines then, later on, we can look at things like measuring SEO, Meta tags, Google Analytics, and Google Console.
In this way, you are focusing and getting into the right frame of mind for just being immersed in your chosen niche and building an amazing website.
All the technical stuff, on SEO and improving your rankings can come later on.
The plugin has some rather bizarre guidelines like suggesting your chosen keyword must be at the front of your blog post title. While this may be true in the argument for ranking well in the search engines, in my experience I have ranked equally well when the keyword or phrase is within the middle of the title.
So there is no rule of thumb on this. You must right naturally and forcing the keyword to the front of the title of the post will come off as looking weird and not making any sense.
This will undermine your success with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as the search engine algorithms will determine that you are trying to ‘keyword stuffing’ rather than expressing your creative writings naturally.
If the user is completely new to building their very first blog in WordPress and learning the ropes then they may not realize this mistake and being misled by these guidelines from the plugin.
Here is a screenshot for one of my posts on this site that ranks at the top of both Google and Bing search engines. This is the analysis for readability by Yoast:
I am targeting the keyword “eleven40 pro theme review” and it has been staying constantly up at Position 3 on Google and Position 2 on Bing since it was published back October 2018 despite the competition. Here are Yoast’s guidelines for the SEO Analysis for my post:
As you can see above, these suggestions offer a number of steps to follow in improving your content.
However, newcomers who are just starting out can get frustrated about the score ratings that Yoast is giving. Yet these guidelines are irrelevant here as you can see this post is ranking at the very top of the search engines with great success.
The Yoast suggestions are just that suggestions and they are not mandatory pursuits for success.
It is just to give information for your guidance. However, it is really unnecessary clutter as I ranked this post without using Yoast and its Guidelines. Here are two screenshots of Google and Bing Ranking Positions for this post:
And the rankings in Bing search engine:
Seriously, all this stuff about guidelines and suggestions for guidance is a waste of time! What is important is your readers and the user experience they are having when they visit your site.
Always remember to write from the heart thinking of your readers and never the logic of rules and suggestions.
As you can see here in one of my posts, what one should be focusing on is producing valuable content for the internet community in your chosen niche. What we see here is proof that Google with its algorithms will work out and ‘read’ your content to determine the value of what you have written.
Just because my post above is not being given a good rating from Yoast it does not mean that SEO is not being done correctly. Rather, you are not doing SEO correctly if do not write great valuable content on your website.
Therefore, the lesson learned here is that people get lost and go down the wrong path that they are doing something wrong with SEO or worry about it too early. What they need to do is deliver great content for their visitors viewing their WordPress blog.
Personally, I have never used Yoast that much as I found it was full of distractions and a lot of irrelevance.
Google has always said try not to get too distracted with keywords and SEO, instead, just write naturally. If you do that then the magic will automatically start to flow.
All-In-One Plugin
The All-In-One (AIO) plugin is what I use and recommend for beginners or indeed advance users as well. There is no complicated rules and suggestions which as I have mentioned before can cause confusion for people just starting out learning WordPress blogging.
I cannot emphasize this enough no matter your niche you should be totally immersed in the subject and its universe focusing on delivering great content for your readers.
Eventually when you have built out your content and website then you can start to optimize it with SEO and target relevant keywords. This gets you into the correct frame of mind of focusing on giving your readers a wonderful user experience when they visit your site.
This is the correct approach to SEO.
Google and Bing will take care of the rest.
The AIO plugin is very popular with bloggers using WordPress and it is what I personally use for all of my sites.
It is nice, clean and uncluttered.
You are not distracted by figures and ratings.
If you are using the SiteRubix Platform Technology which is built on the WordPress CMS framework and is free to use inside Wealthy Affiliate for your website, then you will already have the All-In-One plugin installed.
To give you more background of the AIO plugin I have provided a video tutorial that shows how to use it correctly. It does have a lot of unnecessary settings but you can ignore them as the tutorial points out.
This tutorial below gives you everything you need to know to use AIO correctly when setting everything up inside WordPress.
Having your site optimized with SEO creates a long term sustainable business online allowing you to bring in a phenomenal amount of traffic organically. It means that you may never need to pay for traffic at all as your content ranks in Google which cover 70% of the search engines on the internet.
The Verdict: AIO or Yoast?
As you can see from the video and from my own experience of success online, the All-In-One plugin is highly recommended and I don’t think I will ever switch to Yoast.
They both have their own advantages and disadvantages but I reckon AIO is much better and gets rid of the baggage that comes with being pedantic around keyword density and SEO analysis.
What we need to be focusing on is great content.
If you are doing well with Yoast then don’t change for the sake of it as likely you are doing just fine. If as a beginner you are starting out and looking for a suitable SEO plugin then All-In-One is the way to go.
In my opinion, AIO is the best SEO plugin for your WordPress site and I think it will always be.
When using Yoast and you like it I think a note of caution is warranted.
Do not allow yourself to be pedantic by its suggestions and guidelines on readability and keyword densities. As you can see above the scoring for my article, the plugin was showing issues with an SEO analysis and readability.
However, you do not want to be rating really well all the time since your content is always going to be different!
This shows that you are a human and not having content written by a robot. And that is one of the elements that the search algorithms use for ranking the keywords and content on your site.
If every single post you write is perfect every time then it would look suspicious. You are going to have a mixture of content that is good and some not so appealing to your audience.
Do let me know what your thoughts are below. What do you think?
If you know people debating on or asking questions on what is the best SEO plugin to use on their WordPress site, kindly share this post with them.
Thank you for reading and Happy content creation!
Leave a Reply