-
Posts
-
Hi,
In another thread (http://www.symbiostock.org/forums/topic/yoast-seo-helping-buyers-to-find-site/) Steve stresses the importance of SEO and how much help the Yoast SEO plugin could be. For that reason, I guess, Yoast SEO has been quite popular among the early Symbiostock site owners. Many have done lot of work to define Focus Keywords and optimize Meta Descriptions for their images. I have spent many hours on that as well.
Now, using the Importer plugin to migrate images from my legacy site I noticed that all the SEO relevant optimizations I did in Yoast SEO are lost during the import. I don’t see any easy way to recreate this meta info. I have no idea how much coding would be necessary to upgrade the Importer plugin to also transfer Yoast SEO data (most important, I think, would be export/import of _yoast_wpseo_focuskw and _yoast_wpseo_metadesc in postmeta). It could be an important point convincing legacy site owners to join.
I’d gladly volunteer as beta tester if Robin decides it is worth the effort to improve the Importer plugin in this way.
Stephan
Don’t stress about the YOAST SEO plugin too much. Good SEO is not rocket science, you’ll need a good title, description, image, and relevant internal and external links. The “focus keyword” feature of Yoast is only a measurement tool to compare your page against. It doesn’t make your SEO better or worse, and it won’t get you a better Google listing.
Maintain your products with relevant texts and make sure your WP creates pages with individual titles and descriptions. That’s all it takes, IMO.You are right about the Yoast’s Focus Keyword being just an internal gauge. I find it very helpful to locate the image pages that still need work. The meta description is the short text that shows on Google (and other search pages) below the title. While it is not (very) important for your ranking, it is very important when it comes to the decision of a Google user to click through to your image page or not to click. Your meta descriptions thus advertise your content to searchers and I think it is important to optimize these bits of text as well.
This isn’t a deal-breaker for me. I just think if the required coding to implement export/import of this info stays within reasonable limits it would be a nice, work-saving add-on for me and other legacy Symbiostockers that have used/worked with the Yoast SEO plugin. Let’s wait and hear what Robin says…
I think I’m not understanding the problem. Titles and captions are being imported during the process. All you need to do is set up your Yoast plugin to capture them and to put them into the meta settings. At least that’s how I did it. The focus keywords won’t be there but titles, captions, and keywords are available after migration.
Yes, but many if not most of my image captions are too long for the 155 (or so) characters the meta description allows. So they get truncated and what remains doesn’t really cut it for the purpose.
Could someone with more experience of Yoast than I have explain how to fill in the title metadata, description metadata sections of the Titles and Meta section of Yoast? As Robin mentioned in a different post, none of mine have anything useful in them.
Steve
Could someone with more experience of Yoast than I have explain how to fill in the title metadata, description metadata sections of the Titles and Meta section of Yoast? As Robin mentioned in a different post, none of mine have anything useful in them.
Steve
Sure.
WP Admin Panel
SEO – Titles & Metas – Post TypesPosts- Title template: %%title%% %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%
Meta Description Template: %%excerpt%%
Meta Keywords Template: %%tag%%Same for “Pages”.
Media
Title template: %%title%% %%page%%
Meta description template: %%excerpt%%
Meta keywords template: %%tag%%Great thanks!
I don’t have a Meta Keywords Template in my version – perhaps you have a premium version?Steve
While on this subject – I was checking the 404 reports in Yoast of site crawls that didn’t end up on a page. I have a lot that are of this form:
http://www.backyardstockphotos.com/image-type/transport-images/
Is this something that came across from the old Symbiostock design and is still in a google site map somewhere? If so, should I be trying to recreate that map? Is there anything in the new plugin that produces this sort of URL?
Great thanks!
I don’t have a Meta Keywords Template in my version – perhaps you have a premium version?Steve
You can enable meta keywords at “SEO -> Titles & Metas -> Other -> Use meta keywords tag?”
However Yoast seems to think meta keywords are obsolete these days. Your call.While on this subject – I was checking the 404 reports in Yoast of site crawls that didn’t end up on a page. I have a lot that are of this form:
http://www.backyardstockphotos.com/image-type/transport-images/
Is this something that came across from the old Symbiostock design and is still in a google site map somewhere? If so, should I be trying to recreate that map? Is there anything in the new plugin that produces this sort of URL?
Yes, that’s probably from the old Symbiostock. It might still be in your sitemap. I’d check your root directory and delete all old sitemaps. Then delete those sitemaps from your Google Webmaster Tools account if you had them in there.
If you think it’s very important to keep these links you could also do redirects in your .htaccess file.
But at the end it’s just a question of time. If the search engines don’t find these pages anymore they will sooner or later remove them from their indexes.I’m guessing you have missed setting your permalinks in the WP settings accordingly. You could still do it but I think at this point the search engines have probably caught your new post structure already.
Hey Steve,
Generally, for third party plugins, contributors submit support requests:
http://www.symbiostock.org/support/
It just takes too much time and resources to try to deal with non-Symbiostock software, especially if, in the future, Yoast changes anything about their infrastructure. It’s not just making it compatible right now – it has to remain compatible if it is a permanent feature. Accordingly, it would have to be a ‘custom job’ as the only third party software we have the resources to maintain compatibility with is WooCommerce.
If you are familiar with MySQL and PHP, you could very realistically import this data yourself. Just find out what tables and fields are used in Yoast, and use string comparisons to match the legacy products to the new products after the import. It is actually a little more complicated, but do-able.
I do understand your need to preserve it – you are correct, sometimes descriptions are longer than an optimized meta description and if you’ve put a lot of work into making all your media optimized, it is a shame to waste it.
One thing to note is that the importer preserves all your slugs – so not only do you not have to lose any SEO juice, but you can import the Yoast stuff after the import is done too. If you want to try it yourself, don’t hesitate to post questions here with information on your progress and I can try to guide you if needed.
I have a Yoast related problem also. I’m using All-in-One SEO plugin before and then I decided to use Yoast. Almost everything works perfect except for the sitemap. By searching solution in google I fixed the ‘product pages’ URL errors but still have this error in ‘main pages’. It still using symbiostock sub-domain.
Hey Steve, Generally, for third party plugins, contributors submit support requests: http://www.symbiostock.org/support/ It just takes too much time and resources to try to deal with non-Symbiostock software, especially if, in the future, Yoast changes anything about their infrastructure. It’s not just making it compatible right now – it has to remain compatible if it is a permanent feature. Accordingly, it would have to be a ‘custom job’ as the only third party software we have the resources to maintain compatibility with is WooCommerce. If you are familiar with MySQL and PHP, you could very realistically import this data yourself. Just find out what tables and fields are used in Yoast, and use string comparisons to match the legacy products to the new products after the import. It is actually a little more complicated, but do-able. I do understand your need to preserve it – you are correct, sometimes descriptions are longer than an optimized meta description and if you’ve put a lot of work into making all your media optimized, it is a shame to waste it. One thing to note is that the importer preserves all your slugs – so not only do you not have to lose any SEO juice, but you can import the Yoast stuff after the import is done too. If you want to try it yourself, don’t hesitate to post questions here with information on your progress and I can try to guide you if needed.
Thank you, Robin, for looking into it. No worries. I understand this could open a can of worms for you. We rather want you to stay focused on Symbiostock/Symzio. The more I dig around this issue the more loose ends I start seeing. It is not just Yoast info. I also want a number of descriptions changed/filtered and I have to look at what the system writes back into image EXIF as there are images with quite extensive descriptions (like 500+ words) that I would like to have shortened in EXIF. Although I am a lousy coder I’ll probably tackle all this myself. Thank you for offering your support here in the forum. I’ll definitely post my progress and ask for help when I am stuck.
Happy new year!
Stephan
Thanks for your understanding – you seem to really grasp that it’s a limited operation and that focusing on Symzio is really the most important aspect of our success. If I spent time on Yoast importing, I’d spend less time marketing – and marketing is now everything.
You must be logged in to reply to this topic.