Tag: Yoast

28
Jan

Do You Use Yoast’s SEO Plugin? Don’t Let This Happen To You

Every day I shake my head in wonder that publishers don’t use all of the SEO tools at their disposal. Imagine my horror when I realized the title tags for every page and post on my own site were all the same:

Digital publishing news, commentary and advice | Sam Shaddock

And I was all:

terrifying

This website is young enough that I don’t expect to have much search traffic yet, but I did install Yoast’s fantastic SEO plugin to increase my odds of ranking well. It’s an easy tool to set up and use. Just tell it how you want your title tags to render (the default pulls from the headline), and if you want to overwrite it, do so below the post. I’ve been using it to create search-friendly title tags while striving to maintain more conversational headlines. Or so I thought.

Yoast SEO plugin screen shot

La, la, la. I’m so very clever. … Oh, wait.

In the past, that’s all I’ve had to do. Evidently, though, with some WordPress themes you have to take an extra step: checking the “force rewrite titles” box on the first tab in your SEO settings. (If that doesn’t work, try some of the suggestions in this WordPress forum.)

Screen Shot 2015-01-28 at 8.52.33 AM

Now I’m back in business, but man, that was embarrassing.