Though WordPress is built with robust blogging features and emerged as a content management system (CMS) in recent times, it lags built-in SEO capabilities like automatic Sitemap, robots.txt editor, etc. Since the nature of self-hosted WordPress site demands the basic editing capabilities of root files like .htaccess, it is necessary to look for a packaged plugin with all SEO needs. “All in one SEO” plugin offers most of the needed SEO capabilities under single umbrella and no wonder it is one of the most popular plugins in WordPress repository downloaded more than 15 million times.
All features under “All in One SEO” plugin are categorized under three sections:
- General Settings
- Performance
- Feature Manager
We will discuss various features covered under each section in detail.
General SEO Settings
This section is packed with as many as features and we will look in to the most needed ones by all site owners in general.
Canonical URLs
Since www and non-www sites are considered as two different sites by Google, setting 301 redirect at site level is necessary to avoid any penalties due to duplication issue. Enabling “Canonical URL” will set auto redirection for your entire WordPress installation in one click.
Use Original Titles
Enable this option if any other plugin on your site interfering the title tag created by “All in One SEO” plugin.
Related: Review of Yoast SEO plugin.
Home Page and Keyword Settings
Customize title, meta description and keywords for your home page under “Home Page Settings” and enable or disable meta keywords under “Keywords Settings”.
Title Settings
If you always wonder how people are showing different type of separators in title when showing in the search results pages and on the browser tab, then the answer is here.
Enable “Rewrite Titles” option to consider the title tag to be displayed in the chosen format available below this option. For example if you can enter “%post_title% < %blog_title%” in the “Post Title Format” to separate the post title and blog title with “<” symbol.
Verification, Tracking and Google Authorship
“All in One SEO” plugin makes it very easy to verify your site with Google and Bing Webmaster Tools along with Pinterest verification. Just paste the verification code and save your changes to verify your site.
Same manner you can add Analytics tracking code to your site and connect with Google Analytics.
Other important setting available is to add authorship to your site using Google+ profile in order to show the author name in search result pages.
Noindex and Advanced Settings
Use these settings to inform search engines to no-index the chosen taxonomies and exclude pages from “All in One SEO’ plugin.
Performance and System Status
Here you can set performance related parameters like increase PHP memory limit and execution time along with system and plugins status.
Feature Manager
It is the collection of additional features you can activate or deactivate independent of other settings.
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XML Sitemap
This one of the most important feature allows you to generate XML Sitemap for search engine submission. The Sitemap format will be like “http://your-site-name.com/sitemap.xml” which you can submit to Google and other search engines. This is a simple Sitemap compared to Sitemap index file generated in Yoast SEO plugin. The priority and change frequency are automatically determined by the plugin. We can also expect Video Sitemap soon from “All in One SEO”.
Robots.txt
Activating robots.txt feature will enable additional menu as “All in One SEO > Robots.txt”. Here you can view the existing robots.txt file, add additional rules and optimize for standardization.
File Editor
File editor allows you to edit robots.txt and .htaccess file from your WordPress admin dashboard. Enabling this feature also will add additional menu in the sidebar.
Summary
Overall “All in One SEO” plugin provides a SEO power pack to optimize your WordPress site for search engines. Still additional features like breadcrumb, bulk processing, page level validations shall be added in the plugin.
Pros
- Power packed SEO plugin.
- Good alternative for Yoast SEO plugin.
Cons
- Add lots of meta data in the database, check out the postmeta table size when using SEO plugins.
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