Yoast SEO vs. All In One : Setting Up SEO Plugins

WordPress started as an open-source blogging platform, but thanks to thousands of themes and plugins, it’s also suitable for commercial sites. Today WordPress is one of the world’s most popular CMS. WordPress powers over 30% of websites. It has loads of themes and plugins for advanced SEO optimization. WordPress is a perfect CMS for SEO and for creating websites that occupy top positions.

Here are the main reasons why you should use WordPress:

In this post, you will learn how to configure these plugins properly.Wordpress has SEO plugins that make the life of website owners’ easy, such as Yoast SEO plugin and All in One SEO Pack. Our post “Yoast SEO vs All in One SEO Pack. Comparison, Analysis, and FAQ“ will help you make the right choice.

Initial Yoast SEO Configuration

Configuring SEO Yoast might not seem easy at first. Here is a brief guide on its basic configuration.

1. Install Yoast SEO

You can find it in the plugin search bar. Just type in its name, and it’ll pop up. After its activation, go to step 2.

2. Basic Configuration in Dashboard

• The first tab will show the main problems and improvements.

• You can enable certain settings in Features. The most important are:

1. SEO Analysis. Includes recommendations for optimizing page content.
2. Link suggestions. Includes linking recommendations.
3. Ryte integration. Checks page indexing weekly.
4. XML sitemaps. Includes a sitemap.

Many experts recommend enabling everything. The site map can be disabled if you use another plugin for it.

• In Webmaster Tools, you can connect Google Webmaster. 

3. Search Appearance Tab

This is one of the main tabs. Here you can configure the following:

•  Basic information about your organization data for markup.

• Restrict indexing of certain page categories. This is one of the main advantages of Yoast CEO. In this tab, you can immediately see indexing of which pages can be restricted and for which pages Yoast SEO settings can be turned off (Yoast SEO Meta Box). 

• Configure metadata in bulk. You can see your snippet right away. 

4. Social and Search Console Tabs

Here you can:

• Add data to display a social media snippet.
• Connect data integration to Google console.

These are secondary functions, and you do not have to configure them in the first place.

5. Tools Tab

In the Tools tab, you can:

• Import data from another plugin, for instance, if you are transferring settings from All In One SEO plugin to Yoast SEO.
• Edit robots.txt and .htaccess. You need the help of an SEO expert, especially with .htaccess file. Better not edit these files yourself because your website may stop working.

Another very convenient feature of Yoast SEO is the bulk metadata editor.

6. Redirects Tab

Redirects tab allows you to quickly create and configure redirects. This is a great solution if you deleted a page from your site. All In One SEO plugin does not have this feature.

SEO experts recommend setting up a 301 redirect from an old page to a new one (if you changed the page address and got a 404 error) or 410 redirect (it’ll tell search engines that this page is no longer on the server).

In the Regular Expressions tab, you can configure permanent redirects from certain URL types. This works well for mass redirects, such as from /detail/ to /category/. It is useful if the URL structure has been changed.

You do not need to make any changes to Redirect Settings.

7. Setting Metadata and Canonicals

Here you can change the metadata on each webpage separately. The snippet preview shows what a page looks like in search on a desktop or a smartphone.

More advanced webmasters can:

• Change canonical.
• Noindex a page.
• Restrict a search engine from indexing links. 

These options are available in Advanced Settings. By default, pages are open for indexing and self-referencing canonical is set. This protects the website from any problems with duplicate pages.

In these tabs, you can see the recommendations on the page content and settings for a social media snippet.

All in One SEO Pack Initial Configuration

All in One SEO Pack is easier to configure than Yoast. It has all its basic settings on one page, and all you need is to tick a few boxes in the right places. To configure All In One SEO correctly, follow the steps below.

1. Meta Settings in All In One SEO Pack

Metadata in All In One SEO plugin can be configured in three different ways:

• Directly from the shared pages in the admin panel. For example, from All Posts. 

• Using a template in General Settings. Here, you can customize the metadata associated with the home page.

2. General All in One SEO Settings

General Settings make 80% of all important configurations.

Check the boxes in General settings as in the screenshot below. If you want to know more about each option, click on the question mark next to each option. Here are some important comments:

• Check Canonical URLs, and this will protect your website from page duplication.
• If you tick the second line, then you will set canonical on the first paginated page. SEO experts do not recommend this because it can make it difficult to index some blog posts or online store products.

In Content Type Settings, select the pages where the plugin settings will be displayed.

In Display Settings, select page categories where one can customize metadata.

All in One SEO Pack, just like Yoast SEO, integrate Google Analytics.

There are basic schema.org markup settings where you need to enter information about your organization.

In noindex settings, you can determine what categories of pages to restrict from indexing. The configuration below will work for most websites. 

In advanced settings, it is worth checking 2 options only. Check the autogeneration of descriptions from the text of an article and remove descriptions for paginated pages.

3. All in One SEO Pack Features

The following features can be activated in the Feature Manager:

• Site Map. One of the most important SEO features. We recommend enabling it if you do not use any other plugin.
• Robots.txt. An important file for SEO promotion that blocks search engines from indexing specific pages.
• File Editor. You can enable it, but we do not recommend changing the code if you do not have the skills — your website may stop working.
• Importer & Exporter. Enable this feature if you want to transfer the plugin settings to Yoast SEO.
• Bad Bot Blocker. It will slow down your website. Try enabling it as an experiment.

4. Final Steps

After configuring the basic features, you can conduct a website audit and start working on its content. Remember that in order to achieve results, you have to constantly work on the content quality, link weight, and fix the technical errors on the website.

We hope this post was helpful to you!