After quick tweeting session with Joost de Valk @yoast this is the answer:

yeah that doesn’t work (posting content in widgets), known issue. We’re working on adding a filter to the post content that PODS could hook into.

Once again, many thanks for responding

Gail

thanks for taking the time to look into this.  the tags are fine in Yoast but it is reporting no content on the site.  i can see the content in html on the page source but am worried that if Yoast crawls the site in the same way that the search engines do, then it is going to cache without any content - even when i add content into the content widget it is not picked up by Yoast - very strange...

thanks for your response, this was along the lines of my thinking and i was about to try a different plugin - until i read the response below.  will update any findings

Hi

I am optimising a new site that has been built in Wordpress using Pods.  The Yoast Wordpress SEO plugin is not recognising any content on the site - has anyone any ideas on how to get around this - does it matter - is it the plugin that is at fault rahter than the set up of the site?