WordPress SEO - Optimize Your Titles

• Posted by B Jones on February 2nd, 2006 - Comment on this Post »

This is a quick and easy SEO tutorial on how to improve the titles of your WordPress blog posts (for SEO purposes) using the Optimal Title plugin.

The default title structure of WordPress looks something like this:

Blog Name » Blog Archive » Post Title

The problem with this structure is that the most important part, the Post Title, is at the very end of the title. The Post Title is specific to what that post is about, so it needs to come before everything else.

To fix this problem, I used Optimal Title. It�s a simple and easy to use WP plugin that will optimize your titles.

Just download and install the plugin, upload it to your plugins folder and activate it in the WP control panel.

Before we get started, make sure to make a backup copy of the header.php file that we will be working with.

Now you will need to go to your current theme and edit the header.php file. You can either do this via the WP admin area, or you can download the file and use a text editor. I prefer the text editor because it allows you to undo any horrible mistakes you might make.

Near the top of the file, you should see a bit of code surrounded by the <title></title> tags.

Basic Method (fine in most cases)
This is the example given in the Optimal Title documentation. It works just fine in most cases. Just make the title tag look like this:

<title><?php optimal_title(); ?><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?></title>

After saving the header.php file, browse through several pages on your WP blog to check the results. It will probably be fine.

Advanced Method
The simple example above is probably fine for most sites, but the home page title for SEOlogs.com was just ‘SEOlogs.com’. That is pretty useless on its own because it doesn’t contain any useful keywords and it doesn’t describe the site.

To fix this, I used this small bit of logic tests to see if the page being displayed is the home page. If it is, then the first title (which I tweaked a little bit to my liking) is displayed. Otherwise the optimal title is going to be displayed. This is my personal setup, so you should probably tweak it a bit for your own needs.

<?php if( $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] == “/” || $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] == “/ index.php”){ ?> <title><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?> - SEO Tools and Industry News< /title> <?php } else { ?> < title><?php optimal_title(); ?> <?php bloginfo(’name’); ?> < /title> <?php } ?>

Now I get a good title on the home page, and the great optimal title on all other pages.

New Home Page Title
SEOlogs.com - SEO Tools and Industry News

Title Structure on all Other Pages
Post Title » Blog Name

Changing the Divider from »
One more nice thing about the Optimal Title plugin is that it lets you change the divider (») to whatever you want by adding it to the optimal_title() function as an argument.

Examples:
optimal_title(’-') will change the divider from » to -
optimal_title(’:') will change the divider from » to :

---

Warning:
Always backup your WordPress files before attempting to modify anything. If you don’t know what you are doing, you can really mess things up.

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