Yoast SEO Plugin and Theme Conflict - Meta Tags

[vivadata]

I have installed yoast seo plugin and a theme that I purchased.
I have added site title and meta description for the index page through yoast seo plugin see here http://screencast.com/t/AdjMynym8Tm

however this does not work as can be seen on the test site
http://importingtips.com/test/

does anyone have any advice?

Thanks

[vivadata]

Thanks Paul, that is a great help.

Appreciate the assistance

[ThompsonPaul]

Hah - spotted the problem, viva. You actually have two meta-descriptions coded on the page.

The Yoast code is correct, but on line 11 of the page's code is another

name="description" content="">

That one's empty and must be the one SEOQuake was picking up. Unfortunately, the search engines will probably grab the first (empty) one too, so you need to get it out of there. I'm suspecting it's coming from the theme's SEO settings themselves. You'll need to dig around or Google "using mythemename with Yoast WordPress SEO plugin".

P.

P.S. There's an author metatag there you'll probably want to get rid of too - use Yoast's plugin's authorship markup instead.

[vivadata]

Thanks Paul,

The confusion was I checked the code and it looked good but the seo quake showed no results for the meta description, and I thought seo quake looks directly at the page code rather than any cache when you look at the page info option.

Thanks for all your help

[ThompsonPaul]

Hmmm that SEOQuake report is incorrect, Arthur - not sure if maybe it's pulling an old version of a cache?

The place to check is by actually viewing the source code of your page. Here's what I see for your /test page:

<title>hello</title>

As you can see, all the meta-data is now correctly displayed. (Before I was seeing all of the above except the title tag, which is now there.) So looks like checking Rewrite Title has done the trick.

As far as I can see, you're good to go!

Paul

P.S. To check the source, view the page in your browser, then in Firefox, Right click and select View Source - in Chrome, just click CTRL-U

[vivadata]

Hi Paul,

Thanks for the reply.

I have followed your advice and still have the issue with the  meta description. For some reason it is not been picked up. Take a look at the screen shot below.

http://screencast.com/t/3PjUtUDMeCaq

Do you have any other thoughts?

Thanks
Arthur

[ThompsonPaul]

The plugin is working on your site and is handling all of the meta-data except the page title, Arthur.

Many themes aren't coded to handle meta-titles in the standard way so plugins can control them. There's a setting in Yoast's plugin that can be used to force the rewrite of the titles.

If you go to the plugin's settings and click on the Title and Meta page, there's a check-box at the very top of the General tab called Force Rewrite Titles. If that's not selected, try putting a check-mark in the box. Then clear the WordPress cache if you;re using one, and clear your browser cache before reloading the test page.

Let us know if that works?

Paul

PS this assumes you've also turned off the SEO settings in the theme, which it looks like you have as Yoast's plugin is already setting the other metadata.