You should watch the videos on this page after reading this article.
You’ve found this page because you are interested in optimizing your site’s internal SEO.
You might even be considering installing the ‘All In One SEO’ plugin. After all, it’s a good plugin with lots of positive reviews.
But I want to spend the next 2 minutes giving you a viable alternative. It’s then up to you decide which approach is most suitable for you.
What is the alternative to the All In One SEO Plugin?
The alternative is Thesis, which is a premium wordpress theme with inbuilt SEO functionality. Chris Pearson, its creator, has intentionally set out to get rid of the need for an SEO plugin. We’ll come to WHY he has aspired to do this in a moment.
What are the differences in features between All In One and Thesis?
They largely share the same features. Thesis offers a couple of additional site-wide features that All In One does not (like no-following your ‘Home’ link in your nav menu to minimize link juice loss) , but on a post-by-post basis, you can do the same things with either.
In other words, you can customize your title tags, meta tags, control your no-follow and no-index from within your wordpress page editor, for both.
If the features are similar, then why should you consider Thesis?
It’s to do with how ‘bloated’ your wordpress site becomes once you start using plugins. When you use a plugin, you use a lot of extra php calls and functions on top of your normal site code to make it work. And these extra code calls increase the time it takes for a visitor to load a page on your site.
And this ultimately affects your search engine rankings…
Because Google now factors in page-load time into their algorithm. In Google’s eyes, a faster site equates to a better user experience, so they are now rewarding fast sites.
Now, what Thesis does is bypass the need for a plugin. Instead of having to use code to integrate 3 things (wordpress itself, the wordpress theme, and the plugin), it only has to integrate 2 things (wordpress itself, and the Thesis theme). This dramatically reduces page-load times.
A Faster Site = Better Google Rankings
In fact Shawn Collins, who runs the Affiliate Tips blog, managed to reduce his page load times from 10 seconds down to 1.4 seconds by switching to Thesis. That is a HUGE difference in speed!
So no matter how good a plugin’s feature-list might be, by definition it can never serve as efficient code as something integrated into the theme itself (a plugin implies you are plugging something extra into the code base).
The Upshot?
If you are looking to squeeze every possible SEO edge from your wordpress theme, you should choose Thesis.
Using All In One will improve your core SEO features, but it will compromise on your overall site speed, which itself can affect your rankings. If this is a compromise you’re willing to make, go for All In One SEO.
You should watch the videos on this page after reading this article.
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