Recommendation for SEO plugin for Wordpress

[monicapopa]

Dear Moz Community,

Could I pick your brains on SEO plugins for WordPress?

Our web developer has installed an SEO plugin called Yoast, and I am not quite sure of it's efficiency. The problem we have at the moment is that the Page Title is not updating on Google the way we anticipated. To solve this issue we unchecked forced rewrite under the title options, but this had no effect. For instance our name on Google appears as Man Van London all the time, despite any amendments we make it always has Man Van London at the start of the title. ( website: www.manvanlondon.co.uk)

If Yoast is the best SEO plugin for wordpress, is there any solution to fix this issue?

Or is anyone familiar with another plugin?

Does anyone suggest to not use plugin's at all?

Thank you for your time.

Looking forward to your wisdom.

Monica

[monicapopa]

Thank you for your answers.

[monicapopa]

Thank you for your answer. This clarifies a lot of things.

[adamxj2]

Hey Monica

Similar to what William stated above, the keyword checker tool in Yoast is purely for your reference. It doesn't tell search engines anything. What I do is enter the keyword that is the most important and optimize for that. Then try out the secondary words. You won't be able to have all 3 words in your title or URL or even your meta description, so keep that in mind when the checker comes back yellow or even red.

You don't want to overstuff the page with the keywords or make the wording of your meta description to sound unnatural with overuse of key phrases. I would focus on your primary target and then spread out the other two words within the content/tile tags/alt tags etc.

Hope that makes sense!

[WilliamKammer]

The focus keyword is just a little tool to help you in the backend. You can focus on more than one keyword if you'd like, just check each keyword individually in the tool if you want to use it.

[monicapopa]

Dear Adam,

Thank you for your answer, same question for you. I am wondering if i can have more than one keyword for page? With Yoast I am only allowed to put one focus key word. Is there a way around this? Because of the industry of my client, we should target around 3 keywords per page/post.

Looking forward to your reply.

Monica

[monicapopa]

Dear William,

Thank you for your answer. I am wondering if i can have more than one keyword for page? With Yoast I am only allowed to put one focus key word. Is there a way around this? Because of the industry of my client, we should target around 3 keywords per page/post.

Looking forward to your reply.

Monica

[adamxj2]

Hello!

Yoast is definitely the way to go. However the settings are universal across the site for the title tag creation so you may need to manipulate it a bit to get what you want to show up in Google.

Unchecking the force rewrite is a good place to start. Without knowing how you've integrated WordPress into the site I won't know exactly where the issue is, so I'll give you a couple tips…

Go to Settings > General in WordPress and make sure your site title and tag line are correct. Then, if you have your home page published as a Page in WordPress, make sure the SEO Title at the bottom of the content box matches what you want to see as a result in Google. Then in your header file, make sure that the site title and description is being echoed properly.  Such as something like: " <title><?php wp_title( '|', true, 'right' ); bloginfo( 'name' ); ?></title> "

I have trouble with this on my sites when I install Yoast after everything else in the site is complete. It will often overwrite stuff and then I have to go back in and tweak it.

Hope that helps!

[WilliamKammer]

The Yoast SEO plugin is a good one to go with. Your title tags are changing in the code, so it's not the plugin.

Sometimes (and more often in recent months), Google will rearrange or rewrite a title for their search results. The most common way I see them do it is: "Brand Name: Title Content." You can only attempt to change this with the title tag, but Google still might alter it depending on the query searched to find the site.