So, I just got off the phone with the guys that built our website. In fact it was the founder of the company I just spoke with, they are a web dev and marketing agency. We only needed Web Dev and no SEO, as that is what I do. Some of our pages need to be re-written due to duplicate content (long story and irrelevant to my point) and one of the points that I told this guy was that I wanted the pages written to Yoasts "good" standard (readability only). He then went on to tell me that Yoast isn't very accurate and is used best as a rough guide only. I mentioned "do you mean things like keywords in the first line not being detected because theres code before it" he said "yes, but other reasons also" He went on to say that all you really need are your good headlines, rich snippet, some content that is readable and a few keywords dotted around the content and you'll be fine. He told me as long as you have that, the main essence of SEO comes from the off-page SEO. I think Yoast is pretty good and looking at SEO holistically you want on page SEO to be good to create a better UX which in turn will help you rank higher. So it would be in your best interest to try and satisfy Yoast as much as possible. My question to you all is what does BHW think about this, is this guy right? He runs the agency which has been going for over 5 years so they must be doing something right.
I think he meant that the suggestions which appear in Yoast should be used as a rough guide instead of strictly adhering to them and I don't think there's anything such as keywords in the first line not being detected because of code before it, any text you write on your website is encoded in tags such as <h1>, <p> etc. and are parsable by crawlers.
I handle almost 30 websites and Yoast Seo (+ additional plugins like Glue for Yoast & Amp) is installed on all of them. If you want to improve your chances to get Google traffic it is good to have this plugin. On the other side, your first goal should always be real visitors (content should be written for real people), and 2nd goal should be chasing all green fields in the Yoast plugin.. In short... Use it, but don't get obssesed
Yoast is a brilliant plugin and is absolutely essential for rankings, but at the same time, going above and beyond to get all green on Yoast, while compromising your real user experience isn't recommended.
When you go to a doctor, do you dictate him how to operate? Of course you don't! (unless you're that crazy friend of my granpa) Your job as a client is to have some form of vision in terms of results. Their job is to full-fill them. Plugins, themes, content etc is just means to an end. They are not results. Telling them how to do their job is not only annoying but can be contra-productive.
