SEO plugin by Yoast messing up my title/meta description

[danielpett]

Hey guys,

I'm having some issues with my wordpress blog, and I believe SEO plugin by Yoast could be the one causing it.

I have set a title for my wordpress blog, and a tagline. This was set in dashboard > settings > general

Under "titles and metas" > home in the plugin it says, title: %%sitename%% %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitedesc%%, and meta description is blank.

The reports on seomoz says my title is title+meta description - making it to long (to many characters).

What could be the issue here?

Thanks in advance!

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Daniel

Hard to say without a link but the first thing I would do would be to disable the plugin and see if that puts things right. If that does not work, the plugin may have some incompatibilities with your theme or your theme may have some problems itself.

The Yoast plugin has some configuration that allows you to force the rewriting of the titles so you can check to see if that is enabled on the titles and metas page (and try turning it on / off).

Ultimately, this is likely a theme conflict and many themes have their own SEO settings that may need to be disabled or removed so I would look there firfst.

Can you post a link?

Marcus

[danielpett]

Marcus,

First of all, thanks for the reply!

I will try to disable the plugin and see what happens.

Where do need a link? Here is to the blog in question blogg.loveday.se (don't know if it is of any use though, as it is in swedish).

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey, page title looks fine, no meta description though by the look of things?

[danielpett]

I tried disabling, and what I got now was an empty title. What does that tell me?

That's the problem, part of the title should be in the meta description (as it is put under "tag line" in wordpress settings > general.

Put the tagline is shown right after the title in the title.

[danielpett]

In the plugin this code is put in the title template box: %%sitename%% %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitedesc%%

Maybe this is the reason why title and tag line/meta description is put as title? The "%%sitedesc%%" should perhaps be put in the Meta description template beneath?

[Marcus_Miller]

If you are using the SEO plugin it allows various variables in the title templates. So, to use the page / post title and the site name you would use:

%%title%% | %%sitename%%

To use the title and the site description you would use:

%%title%% | %%sitedesc%%

If you wanted title, site name, site description

%%title%% | %%sitename%% | %%sitedesc%%

If you go to the help tag under the Titles & Meta's section you can get a full list of these variables you can get to customise your template titles.

But, the plugin also allows you to customise on a page by page basis in the page / post settings which is also really useful.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

[danielpett]

Awesome, thanks Marcus!

Just one last thing, where can I in an easy way see what my title and meta description/title is? To see if it works.

[Marcus_Miller]

In Google Chrome:

1. Right click on the page in question and select: View page source

2. Search for <title></em> to see your title</p> <p>3. Search for <em><span><meta </span><span>name</span><span>="</span><span>description</span><span>"</span></em> to see your description</p> <p>Shout if you get stuck!</p> <p>Cheers<br />Marcus </p></title>

[danielpett]

That did the trick! Thanks for the support.

Have a great weekend.

[Marcus_Miller]

You too man!