Plugin comparison: SEO Ultimate vs. Yoast SEO for WordPress
Every WordPress website needs an SEO plugin. I use SEO Ultimate for some sites, and Yoast SEO for others. Most users prefer Yoast SEO, but there are some great features in SEO Ultimate that you should know about before you make your choice. In some case I use SEO Ultimate where another plugin has compatibility issues with Yoast SEO. So I have quite some experience with both plugins and thougth I would share some pros and cons with you, and some wishes to the plugin authors.
Pros with Yoast SEO:
- The SEO evaluation tool that comes with Yoast SEO (red/yellow/green light) is very useful if you are a beginner at SEO. Personally I manage well without it so this is not a decisive argument for me.
- Yoast comes with an option to add a trailing slash to categories which SEO Ultimate does not give you. I just migrated a site from Joomla to WordPress and really needed to be able to add a trailing slash to categories to preserve old urls from Joomla. In this case, Yoast SEO was the plugin that provided a useful solution for me.
- Yoast provides the function to add a canonical tag to category and tag archives. I really miss
that one in SEO Ultimate – add it please! - Yoast allows you to edit the title and description of tags – a great feature that made me migrate from SEO Ultimate to Yoast SEO for one of my sites.
- The Bulk Editor in Yoast SEO allows you to show items with a certain status (published/draft) which I have found useful sometimes.
- Update 2017: Yoast includes a great XML-sitemap. In SEO Ultimate, you need to upgrade to the paid version to get that.
Pros with SEO Ultimate:
- SEO Ultimate allows you to edit Robot tags (noindex/nofollow) in bulk which can be very useful.
- A feature with SEO Ultimate that can be very useful is the Deeplink Juggernaut which creates great internal links for you, with all the necessary settings to make it really good and not too excessive as some other plugins I’ve tried.
- SEO Ultimate allows you to add Google Rich Snippets such as rating etc. I don’t find this feature with Yoast SEO. Correct me if I’m wrong.
- SEO Ultimate has a feature called Code Inserter, that allows you to insert code 1) within the header tag, 2) Before Item Content, 3) After Item Content, and 4) in the Footer. This is very useful if the theme doesn’t provide the option to add code to the header and you don’t want to bother creating a child theme.
Summary:
Both Yoast SEO and SEO Ultimate are very good SEO plugins for WordPress. I generally find Yoast more complete but still there are some sites where I prefer SEO Ultimate, such as when I need to manage a lot of noindex tags or want automatized internal linking.
Over to you – what is your experience with these SEO plugins? Which one do you prefer? Looking forward to your comment.
Hmmm very good artical….
Glad you liked it Asim!
thanks for the review…
I’m glad you liked it! What SEO plugin do you prefer and why?
How can we configure OpenGraph in Yoast in order to coexist both plugins? Should we configure any other options for both? Thanks
Hi John, and welcome! I’m not sure I understand your question. Do you mean you would like to use both SEO Ultimate and Yoast?
Yes, I use the Yoast, but I was trying to use at the same time the SEO ultimate for edit categories and tag tittles, but I think that has caused some damage in page tittles.
Now I’m considering to use only Yoast and also CategoryTinymce for categories. Do you have any sugestions for the tag pages?
Thanks a lot
Having terrible problems with my Yoast – my google site map is not working as Google states I have an invalid date – I have read it should be YYYY/MM/DD – I have no idea where I need to change this and everything that I read tells me I have to go into code which scares the life out of me
Please help!
considering changing from Yoast
My theme is not compatible for Yoast seo, so i was looking for an alternative since I wanted no index feature …thank you for this post, now I found my answer here….:)
Hi Vivek, Glad you found my post helpful! Thanks for the feedback!
Can both plugins co-exist? The rich snippets feature on SEO Ultimate looks promising. Would installing both and only customizing what’s needed work?
I haven’t tried that. I would install SEO Ultimate first and deactivate all modules except rich snippets, and then install Yoast. Please let us know if it worked for you.
l think Yoast SEO (free edition) is far more superior than any other with feautres that the other plugins include in their premium edition.
Hi John, I am bound to agree with you. Yoast has developed a lot since I published this comparison. I use it on every new installation nowadays. Chers!
Thanks to everyone who has had a lot of experience helping me & instructing me to install both Plugins at the same time without any conflict. thank you. Wish you good morning.
Thank you so much.
I am using both Yoast and SEO Ultimate for my blog http://www.opencodez.com/ .
But Yoast is my personal favourite !
You are using both? Why? No compatibility problems?
Between Yoast SEO and SEO Ultimate I would give a vote to Yoast SEO especially when it comes to tech support.For begginers I think they are all equall.But at later stage Yoast SEO is less time consuming and tech support is very fast and prompt.