Recommendation for SEO plugin for Wordpress
-
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
-
Thank you for your answers.
-
Thank you for your answer. This clarifies a lot of things.
-
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!
-
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.
-
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
-
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
-
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!
-
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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to Boost Your WordPress Website Speed to 95+ (Without Premium Plugins)
I'm reaching out for some advice on improving my WordPress website's speed. I'm currently using a free theme for this fusion magazine and aiming for a score of 95+ on Google PageSpeed Insights. I'm aware that premium plugins can significantly enhance performance, but I'm hoping to achieve similar results using primarily free solutions and manual optimizations.
Technical SEO | | mohammadrehanseo0 -
Express js and SEO?
Hi fellow Mozzers, I have been tasked with providing some SEO recommendations for a website that is to be built using express.js and Angular. I wondered whether anyone has had any experience in such a framework? On checking a website built in this and viewing as a GoogleBot etc using the following tools it appears as though most of the content is invisible: http://www.webconfs.com/search-engine-spider-simulator.php http://www.browseo.net/ Obviously this is a huge issue and wonder if there are any workarounds, or reccomendations to assist (even if means moving away from this - would love to hear about it)
Technical SEO | | musthavemarketing2 -
Big SEO Changes
Firstly, this is quite extensive so thank you to anyone who answers some or all of the below! So this is quite a lengthy ordeal, and I'm going to start by saying that I'm no SEO expert (yet). I've paid for SEO for years and only on the odd occasion has it made any real difference. It has come to the point now where I've spent so much money on SEO over the years with practically no benefit that I can't afford to do it anymore, so I am teaching myself. So, back in July my website was hacked for a total sum of three weeks. My SEO/Hosting company at the time didn't do anything about it, let the hack sit there and didn't even take the site offline. It just so happened that at the time I was changing over to a new site at the time anyway, so I launched the new site (completely different in structure to the old one), did all of the relevant 301 redirects, and my traffic hasn't recovered since. I have gone from around 100-150 daily visits to 0-10. The descriptions, keywords, alt image tags, h1 & 2, meta data, etc. is all much better (a lot of it was empty on the previous site) on the new site than it was on the previous site so I was assuming it would be better, but it isn't. Anyone got any suggestions as to why this might be? Here are some specific questions: Canonical Problem? My site is ecommerce and lists some products in several categories, that has resulted in a high duplicate content rate. Is it expected/accepted by google that this would be the case for an ecommerce website or do I need to sort out some serious canonical urls to fix the issue? The site structure of my website could also be a problem, but I'm not qualified enough to know for sure. If you view a product/sub-category, then remove the category section of that link, the product will still appear. I don't know if this structure is good or not? i.e. if you click both links below, the link will appear all the same. http://thespacecollective.com/space-clothing/nasa-and-space-t-shirts http://thespacecollective.com/nasa-and-space-t-shirts Is this a problem for SEO? Duplicate Product Tag Problem? I have many duplicate product tags appearing on many products, should these be blocked in the robots.txt? i.e. http://thespacecollective.com/space-memorabilia/space-flown/apollo-11-flown-cm-meteorite-acrylic http://thespacecollective.com/space-memorabilia/space-flown/apollo-11-flown Site Code Structure When choosing the template I would use for my website I did not stop to consider if the code was SEO friendly, this on my part was due to my ignorance on the subject. Is the site structure SEO-friendly or is it hindering my efforts? Website: http://thespacecollective.com Again, thank you to anyone who takes the time to read/care about the issues facing a newbie. My only option now is to learn SEO myself (which is well overdue), so any advice/answers are appreciated!
Technical SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Posting on Forums for SEO benefit
Hi Is it beneficial to participate on forums in our market place to help become an authority in Googles eyes? I assume even if we don't get links it still useful in terms of co-citation... Thanks
Technical SEO | | jj34340 -
.lbi file - SEO friendly or not?
Up until yesterday afternoon i had never heard of a .lbi file. It turns out it is a library file used by Adobe Dreamweaver. From what i can tell it works like a client side included but i am unsure of the technology behind it. The issue:
Technical SEO | | kchandler
When running through a recent SEO audit for a new client i found these .lbi files being used all over there site for site wide callouts and even navigation. When viewing this content through firebug or in the browser you can see the executed HTML content but when viewing the source or the page in seo-browser.com the content is nowhere to be seen. So my thought is this is not SEO friendly and is the same as displaying content in any client-side script like JavaScript or JQuery. Any feedback or thoughts on this subject would be awesome, especially if anyone has used these previously. Unfortunately i cannot share the client site but i would be more than happy to answer any questions if more detail is needed. Thanks in advance - Kyle0 -
Passing SEO value from a subdomain
Hi Everybody, I have built a website (http://rugby.europcar.ie) which has gone viral and getting huge amounts of traffic world wide. The problem is, all the Facebook shares, tweets and other social traffic is all referencing the subdomain, and now www.europcar.ie where I want to build rankings. What are my best options for referring this ranking power to my main domain? Thanks in advance Ronan
Technical SEO | | notnem0 -
How do you manage Wordpress URL hierarchy with permalinks?
I have quite a few website in Wordpress but I continuously run into the same issue. With permalinks it is not recommended to use /%category%/%post_name%/ because it puts an undue load on your bandwidth, server and makes the crawler crawl a ton of duplicate content pages. On one site changing to that hierarchy even crashed some of the pages (probably a permissions error). I would like a correct information hierarchy, but this doesn't seem like correct play. What do you use as your URL hierarchy?
Technical SEO | | MarloSchneider
Do you have any plugins or fixes for this issue? Thanks0 -
What should be noindexed on a Wordpress blog?
I know this can be a "it depends" answer so I'll try to explain. Qualifications on your answers would be great. I use the Wordpress architecture for myself and clients on sites and blogs. Almost every business site we create has a blog and I'm always working to improve results on them. My strategy has been the following: Categories: General, main content types, general keywords. Index, follow Tags: Very specific, post specific, may only be used once for one post. My categories have descriptions that are displayed on the category pages with excerpts. Tags rarely have a description but are displayed with excerpts on the page. My idea has been to index the categories to crawl the content and they have unique content by showing the category description. Tags shouldn't be archived because they may be all over the place and may have only 1 post with no tag description. I'm trying to reduce duplicate content but I don't want to limit results for my clients and myself. Should I set tags to noindex, follow or should I have them indexed? The only thing I'm thinking with having the tags indexed is that I may be able to get additional traffic through the more specific tags (i.e. tag = meta tags, category = SEO).
Technical SEO | | JaredDetroit0