Can these Yoast SEO integration issued be solved?

[GerryWeitz]

I had a site analysis done by the Yoast team.  Of course, one of their recommendations was to install the Yoast SEO product.  I see that there are many independent sources highly recommending it.

But my programming is coming back with some concerns. My website is www.heartspm.com, for anyone who is interested in further analysis of my issue.

My programmer's notes follow.  Unfortunately, they are a bit to cryptic:

"1. it does not do all for us anyway, so we'd have to keep the one's I made
before anyway, at least partially, but it will add up to complexety, loading
time as all new, and especially one-size-fits all plugins

2. another problem - Simple Press forum. Yoast does not have an extention for it, nor is it going to work along with our existing forum's SEO handling solution. So, it's
either reverting back to original SEO handling or forgetting Yoast.

3. original handling means no meta description although I think Yoast will put just
one description for each page, and title will be something like "<forum <br="">title> - <topic title="">whatever else you may want"

4. the same thing with XML sitemap

5. we won't be able to use Yoast's because it won't handle cities

6. and hopefully it will work with our existing XML sitemap solution as this can be turned off"

Now, The Yoast team admitted and logically said that the Yoast plugin cannot support another plugin and therefore it does not support forums.  We currently integrate the forum into our Wordpress site and perhaps imperfectly, but we are able to append forum links to the xml sitemap.   Do any of you have insight into how one incorporates a forum into a Wordpress blog while using Yoast SEO?</topic></forum>

We have special parameter based handling of cities.  We used to pass codes like city=?zip and the like.  Now, the URLS are very clean looking, but they use templates to match up cities in a city table with content that is somewhat similar, yet customizable.  So my programmer seems to be saying that the Yoast tool doesn't seem to handle templates well or is not able to interpret it and get it into a sitemap.  Do any of you have insight into using Yoast SEO with Wordpress sites that use templates and variables for locals or something of a similar nature?

The Yoast SEO module also has switches to help resolve issues with duplicate content and archives and authors and multiple pages, i.e. page 1-10 of Latest News.  If I can't use the whole Yoast module, are there ways to use only parts of it or to strip it down to what I want?

Do you think with the above considerations, that the Yoast SEO module is not worth the trouble?

Thanks in advance,

Humbly,

Gerry

[Packetman007]

We are just starting several new sites.  We chose Yoast for SEO.  It has taken our sites up for 8 months from almost no traffic to 5-10 times the traffic in about a month.  If that continues it will be grand.

The version we are using is new and its features rich for a non-expert.  For instance, Google+ is easy to implement putting my pic up on Google SERPs.  It provides an effective and consistent SEO interface for all pages, posts, categories and tags if you are using them with an SEO status red yellow green light that can be sorted - and easy to use SEO page tools integrated.  I like it.

Now, if I had lots of custom programing as it sounds you do, you may want to gradually integrate the product or just use the basics. Yoast's model is simple to operate, but his approach is fairly comprehensive for such a complex "black art" as SEO.  I think Google will respect his work in the end as an honorable approach to SEO for the average WP site.

No doubt it is not a panacea, nor right for everyone, but it seems his formula is sound and easy to implement and I can say so far it is working for me.

www.apalytics.com corp site

www.cio-tech.com executive blog

www.synsynack.com network analysis blog

I feel that it is well worth the effort to invest in the Yoast model.

Bill Alderson