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When redesigning the Virtual Marketing Blog, we ran into a number of issues related to optimizing the site for search engines. One of those issues was the title tag.
The default title that comes with Wordpress will likely leave a lot of pages in Google’s supplemental results because the name of the blog appears at the beginning of each title on every page. By default the blog name appears first then some funny arrow and lastly the name of the post, category or page. The most important information appears last.
Home Page Title
We wanted our home page title to to be “Internet Marketing Blog” followed by our tag line “Internet Marketing News, Reviews and Insights”. The name of our blog is Virtual Marketing Blog, but we come up first in searches for that term even without having it in our title because we have many links coming into our site with those words in the anchor text, and they are in our url. There are more searches for “Internet Marketing Blog” than “Virtual Marketing Blog” so we can get more traffic if we rank high for “Internet Marketing Blog”.
Titles for Individual Posts
For our post pages, we wanted just the name of the post to appear in the title. Having the name of the blog at the end of the title on post pages isn’t going to improve search rankings and could put some of our pages in the supplemental results.
Titles for All Other Pages
We wanted our category pages to have the name of the category followed by the name of our blog and all other pages to show just the name of the page.
We feel that this title strategy serves us best for search. To accomplish this we use the following title tag code:
<title>
<?php if (is_home () ) { bloginfo(‘name’); echo ‘ - PUT YOUR KEYWORDS HERE’ ;}
elseif ( is_category() ) { single_cat_title(); echo ‘ - ‘ ; bloginfo(‘name’); }
elseif (is_single() ) { single_post_title();}
elseif (is_page() ) { single_post_title();}
else { echo trim(wp_title(’»’,false), ‘» ‘); } ?>
</title>
All In One SEO Pack Wordpress Plugin
Another easy solution to the title tag problem is to use the All in One SEO Pack Wordpress Plugin which allows you to create a unique title tag, meta description and meta keywords.
If you decide to use All In One SEO Pack, make sure that you don’t have meta description and keyword tags already in your header.php file. This will cause your pages to have two sets of meta description and keyword tags. Also, make sure that <?php wp_head(); ?> is placed somewhere between the <head> and </head> tags to ensure that the meta description and keyword tags show up.
More SEO for Wordpress:
SEO for Wordpress Part 1: Title Tags
SEO for Wordpress Part 2: Header Tags
SEO for Wordpress Part 3: Filenames
SEO for Wordpress Part 4: Meta Description
SEO for Wordpress Part 5: Duplicate Content
SEO for Wordpress Part 6: Organizing Category Pages
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