When it comes to maintaining a WordPress website’s SEO, there are plenty of plugins that you can use for this purpose. Yoast has been the favorite plugin of website owners for more than ten years, but now, there is one more player in the market named SEOpress. There is already a lot of debate among website owners about Yoast VS SEOpress. This article is a comprehensive comparison between Yoast and SEOpress based on their functionalities, features, and benefits.
Read this article to get an idea about the credibility of both plugins, so you can make a better choice of the SEO plugin for your WordPress website. This article will guide you to find the best SEO plugin for WordPress. Although both plugins are reliable, you have to understand the SEO needs of your website to pick the suitable WordPress SEO plugin for you.
Check out this article to find the best WordPress SEO Plugins.
Table of Contents
About Yoast Plugin
Yoast SEO is one of the most recommended and effective WordPress SEO plugins. It has been downloaded around 202 million times and has more than 5 million installations. Yoast SEO was developed by Joost de Valk in 2010 as a WordPress plugin. There is no doubt that Yoast is one of the most extensively famous SEO plugins and it is also very easy to manage. Whether you are managing a professional website for a client or running a personal blog, Yoast is a go-to tool that can support you to make your website SEO-friendly. Yoast SEO has assisted millions of websites globally to improve their search engine ranking.
About SEOpress Plugin
SEOPress is a powerful WordPress SEO plugin for WordPress SEO optimization, improving social sharing, increasing your traffic, building custom XML and HTML Sitemaps, adding schemas / Google Structured data types, creating optimized breadcrumbs, managing 301 redirections, and much more. One of the best things about this plugin is that there is no advertising, white-label, no footprints, in frontend and backend. The content analysis feature of SEOPress would help you to write SEO-friendly content.
Using this plugin, you can import your post and term metadata in 1 click from other plugins. SEOPress is lightweight with many features and has to compete with some well-known names such as Yoast. You can say that this SEO plugin is an all-in-one SEO pack.
Major Benefits / Features of Yoast Plugin
Yoast is a plugin that offers one of the best search engine optimization services. This plugin’s pro version gives you everything, you need for SEO. Following are some of the major functions of Yoast:
SEO & Readability Check
Yoast SEO will help you in creating content. This is also based on methodical research on readability, for example, the Flesch Reading Ease score. The plugin supports you with things you to turn your readability button and SEO button green. It allows up to five keywords for keyword optimization on every page. These 5 keywords are those you choose to rank for on the search engine. You can also check the Google, Twitter, and Facebook previews on the page.
Updated for Google’s Algorithm
As we know search engine algorithms are changing continually. A Yoast SEO plugin is also always updated for the up-to-date changes made.
Preview Your Page in Google
Yoast lets you fill out all the options and view what your complete page looks like on Google before publishing it. It is a very unique tool and it also helps in making a responsive design of your website page.
No Advertisement (in Paid Version)
Several users complain that they have to watch repeated ads while using Yoast SEO. However, there is an issue with the free version. You can get rid of ads by upgrading the paid version of this plugin. When you upgrade the Yoast SEO Premium version to get enhanced benefits. You can avoid duplicity of content by not confusing the search engine Google with the plagiarized content.
Ideal for Search Engines Search Pages
Using this plugin, you can easily seduce search engines. If you want to ensure that you are correctly using the keywords in content, then Yoast can support you in this matter. It can show if the keywords are properly utilized and placed in content. Yoast SEO will make sure that the automatic configuration can optimize your content for search engines. It does not matter if you are conscious of the sitemaps, htaccess files, robots.txt, clean permalink URLs, etc. The best thing about this plugin is that every two weeks you can update it.
Yoast XML Sitemap Generation
Sitemaps are like roadmaps with packed URLs that help the search engine find and crawl quickly. Sitemaps let search engines find important web pages to index, without missing any of them. The XML sitemap also lets you specify extra information regarding URLs such as:
- When it was updated last?
- How significant the page is as compared with other pages on the website?
- How often does the website change?
The Yoast plugin supports automatically generating sitemaps for the website. You can modify your posts to not appear in the sitemap using this plugin.
Search Console
Now, it has become very easy to find website crawl errors with the search console feature of Yoast SEO. By linking the Google search console with the WordPress Yoast plugin, you can effectively deal with website crawl errors. As we know the WordPress website is easier to use and maintain; you can directly get the information from the search console using this plugin. You can also screen the crawl errors of the website on the Yoast dashboard and this issue can be resolved from the dashboard.
Advanced Tools
in this plugin, there is another feature known as “Tools”, it has three built-in options “File Editor”, “Import and Export”, and “Bulk Editor”. In the Yoast SEO plugin, the bulk editor is the best feature so far; you can easily edit SEO titles of posts at a time. You don’t have to use this feature regularly. File editor is a feature; that allows you to make changes on “.htaccess file” and “robots.txt”. The last feature in this tool is “Import and Export”, it also supports you to back up chosen SEO plugin settings; allowing you to export settings to other sites and import the settings from other SEO plugins.
Major Benefits / Features of SEOPress Plugin
Titles & Metas
The ability to manage your titles, meta description, and meta robots (nofollow, noindex, noimageindex, noodp, nosnippet, noarchive,) for every page, post, archive page, and custom post type. When it comes to SEO this plugin leaves no stone unturned.
Give a Sitemap to Google
You can massively improve your SEO rankings by offering XML sitemaps of your pages, posts, terms taxonomy, and custom post types. This works well for videos, news content, and images. The search engines use the XML sitemaps to crawl your website. HTML sitemaps direct visitors to the desired pages on the internet. They also help human visitors and bots navigate your website and contribute to your overall SEO.
Google Knowledge Graph
The Google Knowledge Graph inclusion in this plugin is a real benefit. If you are not familiar with it, search for a company, movie, or artist and look to the right of the results shown on the search engine. You would see a box containing social media links, a short bio, supplementary information, and web links. This is known as the Google Knowledge Graph. SEOPress lets you make your own Google Knowledge Graph that will be displayed whenever you come up in a search.
Content Analysis
We are mostly very doubtful of algorithms or apps that say they can write better than a human. Content Analysis is also one of these tools, but it does it quite well. This tool is more likely to deal with headlines, content structure, imagery, titles, and general help with your content formatting for SEO, mainly to tweak on-page optimization to help you rank.
Improve Social Networking
You can improve your social network sharing with Open Graph tags (Pinterest and Facebook), Google Knowledge Graph, Twitter Card, and so on. SEOPress gives you the ability to increase the ranking of your site and also get you indexed and noticed on Social Media.
404 Monitoring
One of the SEOPress Pro features is 404 monitoring which will scan your website to find any broken links and works on the separate broken link manager to make sure that your website is completely navigable. While having all links does not improve the SEO of your website, having broken links can have a bad impact on SEO. They can affect the visitor experience, so you can use SEOPress Pro feature 404 monitoring to deal with broken links and improve the SEO of the website.
Broken Link Checker
The job of SEOPress broken link checker is very much similar to 404 monitoring, the only difference is that it doesn’t monitor. You have to activate a scan to start the process but this process is quite similar. All website hyperlinks are scanned by this plugin which offers a list of broken links for repairing purposes.
You can delete or correct links as appropriate. This is an important feature of technical SEO. Most of the time, you have to buy specific software to carry out this process, so you can save your money by having this built-in feature.
Google Analytics
Using your Google account, you can directly access Google Analytics, but it is better to also have it on the dashboard within WordPress. You just have to give Google login for SEOPress to collect data and the rest is done for you. This will provide you with enough data in the Google Console to help you get started.
Better Users Experience
The SEOPress is also known for its user experience. It is very beginner-friendly because everything is clarified and documentation and videos demonstrate the most important aspects of this plugin. It is not very friendly in making decisions and settings. You have to make a plan and spend some hours working with the options available.
Steps to Install Yoast/ SEOPress WordPress Plugin
The installation and activation of both WordPress SEO plugins are similar to each other.
The overall steps of installing and activating the Yoast and SEOPress are the same.
- In your WordPress dashboard, go to the Plugins page and search for the name of the WordPress SEO plugin that you to install and activate.
- Click on the install button to install the required plugin. Once your plugin is installed and activated, you will see the SEO option in the left menu of the admin area.
- Click SEO > Dashboard. You can set up the WordPress SEO plugin.
NOTE: All steps are enough for SEOPress but in the case of Yoast SEO, you go ahead and do the complete configuration of the plugin based on the SEO needs of your website.
Wrapping Up
We all know how important are the SEO plugins for online search engine optimization. This article discussed the features, functions, benefits, and market value of Yoast vs SEOPress plugins. I don’t want to be biased, favoring one plugin and recommending it to you. Both plugins are good at their places but what is best for you depends on your website’s SEO needs. Before choosing any of the plugins, you have to be very clear about your SEO requirements for the website.
Using all the information, you will have enough understanding of both plugins that also make it easier for you to choose among them.
I hope you find this article helpful. If you have any further queries about these plugins, you can ask me in the comments.