A conflict you may come across is between The Events Calendar and Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin. In short, the meta title settings in Yoast work extremely well throughout The Events Calendar with one glaring exception: the main calendar page.

What is the meta title?

If you’re wondering what the meta title is, it’s the HTML tag that defines the text you see in the browser tab for a webpage.

kb-yoast-titletag

The meta title is important for a number of reasons, one of which is that it is what displays in search engine results.

kb-yoast-searchresult

Check out this article for an extremely thorough overview of the meta title.

Conflict overview

Yoast provides the ability to customize the meta title for your pages, posts, archives, including those for custom post types, which is what Events posts in The Events Calendar are. You can see these settings in Yoast’s plugin under SEO > Titles & Metas.

kb-yoast-titleseparator

Let’s say we’ve updated the Yoast settings so that the meta title uses a dash to separate our page, post and archive titles from the site name globally across the website.

The Events Calendar respects this setting everywhere, except for the main calendar page. For example, you will see the new dash title separator on any subsequent calendar page, such as a single event post, or when paginating through future and past events. However, the main calendar page will continue to show the previous title separator.

Here is the meta title of the main calendar page:

kb-yoast-titleseparator-before

And here is the meta title of a subsequent page:

kb-yoast-titleseparator-after

See where the vertical line separator in the first screenshot should be a dash? This happens even though the calendar is a custom post type archive. The issue also applies to the wording in the meta title in addition to the separator.

What we’re doing about it

There’s no doubt that we take search engine optimization seriously and we want very much to do everything we can to follow good SEO practices in the code we ship. We also recognize that many sites use Yoast’s SEO plugin and we want to do everything we can on our end to ensure maximum compatibility between the plugins.

That said, we’re currently discussing this conflict with the fine folks over at Yoast and trying to figure out what possible improvements we both can make to ensure better compatibility. There’s nothing to share yet, but we will certainly post again when more progress has been made. In the meantime, please feel free to hit us up at our help desk if any questions or issues pop up and we’d be happy to help you there.