Comparison of WordPress SEO Plugins

I’ve had my fair of problems and gripes with SEO on wordpress, especially with the “All in One SEO Pack” you can check it out Alternative to All in One SEO Pack ^_^

So that was like a year ago, nowadays there are loads of plugins that do what i want or part of what i want, however cause there is no point in testing 20 plugins, im narrowing it down, so for this review im choosing just plugins that have a minimum set of features that i need (like meta tags in the head, canonical urls,…), that have been updated recently (last 3 months), that aren’t on the first version (at least a couple of updates under the belt) and that have a control panel, also i’ve tested all these plugins for obvious misleading or security leaks, at this moment they have none that i can see (actually one has, sorry made this intro before the testing hehehe).

WordPress SEO by Yoast

• Specs: 98kb zip / Average Rating on WordPress: 5 stars
• Pros: its enable by default, nice detached admin page, explanations with loads of options, quite a few added features (like authentication for google webmasters or breadcrumbs, both nice but not necessary for SEO), import ability to several other SEO plugins.
• Cons: inserts the most amount of junk on the site’s header including plugin version number than all the plugins in this list, quite a few irrelevant options/features.
• Hummmm: Looking good, and it makes “All in One SEO Pack” look like amateur hour, it has almost the same amount of junk and promos but done nicely and cleanly, also its pretty well organized, if it wasn’t for all the junk inserted into your site’s header, it would have been a really high contender.

SEO Ultimate

• Specs: 490kb zip / Average Rating on WordPress: 4 stars
• Pros: huge amount of features (19 different modules), modular system (you can activate and deactivate features you want).
• Cons: its not enable by default, some of these feature modules are just a one option affair, others offer features that are good for SEO research but that are not needed as a wordpress plugin (there are better tools and sites and ways to get that info), some modules seem incomplete, exploit scanner gave 3 severe warnings with SEO ultimate (obscured links and dropping tables).
• Hummmm: wholy jesus, if gre’s high performance SEO is overkill, then SEO Ultimate is trying to live up to its name, by being ULTIMATE!!!! i would say that it could be a pretty nice companion to another seo plugin (by deactivating the modules with duplicate or irrelevant functions), still its the only one that gave security warnings, so with alternatives, i would stay away.

Greg’s High Performance SEO

• Specs: 212kb zip / Average Rating on WordPress: 4.5 stars
• Pros: simple, clear and very instructive admin page, loads of functions and explanations.
• Cons: pub directly on your admin page (from pluginsponsors.com), complex to setup, and to be 100% efficient needs to be hardwired into the theme, its not enable by default.
• Hummmm: high performance or not, this is a case of overload, SEO is just a small part of a website performance and its not even the most important by far, a site with no SEO but with high quality content, performance and promotion will always win, this plugin is too much, also tweaking too much of SEO might do more harm than good, this one if for the ubber tinkerers.

Platinum SEO Pack

• Specs: 137kb zip / Average Rating on WordPress: 4 stars
• Pros: enabled by default, basically same feature set as “All in one SEO Pack”, clean detached admin page, ability to migrate from “All in one SEO Pack”.
• Cons: still some junk on the site header including plugin version number (still a bit less than “All in one SEO Pack”).
• Hummmm: im impressed by not being impressed, platinum seo is basically “All in one SEO Pack” without the shitty stuff, sooo pretty good ^_^

SeoPress

• Specs: 435kb zip / Average Rating on WordPress: 4 stars (taking from their previously name)
• Pros: ahhhhh…
• Cons: not enable by default, huge amount of pages, complicated and confusing as hell, lots of functions are not available, while having lots of links to the pro version.
• Hummmm: this one is supposed to be good with buddypress and wordpress mu, but in hindsight i rather have no SEO than whatever this is, so no pros, only cons, actually the only SEO plugin in this pack that i would stay away like it was the black plague.

All In One SEO Pack

• Specs: 176kb zip / Average Rating on WordPress: 4 stars / Most Popular SEO Pack
• Pros: Loads of features, default selection of options is good.
• Cons: Its not enabled by default, huge amounts of junk and links and banners on the admin page, weird options, inserts junk on the site’s header including plugin version number.
• Hummmm: I used to like it, but i think with time “all in one seo pack” as degraded itself, you can promote other stuff and still keep yourself useful and practical, the main fold doesn’t even have any options its just pub and shit, also some of the options and functions are not that useful in SEO or even practical.

Conclusion and What are you going to use?

Hummm this one is a big thought, but i would say the clear winners and real all in one seo alternatives are  WordPress SEO by Yoast and Platinum SEO Pack, but for diferent reasons, if you want a clean, simple SEO option for WordPress i would go with Platinum SEO Pack, it has everything you need, but if you want a bit of an edge and more options and better understanding of the features, then i would go with WordPress SEO by Yoast.

S2R is officially moving all their WordPress Sites from All In One SEO Pack to Platinum SEO Pack, mostly cause i don’t need the extra features that WordPress SEO by Yoast offers and i don’t like the added junk that WordPress SEO by Yoast adds to the site header.