Dave

Wordpress Hack : SEO Friendly Titles

 
By Dave in Blogs and Blogging
October 7th, 2007




Wordpress Logo Wordpress is the greatest blogging software ever created, however there are a few issues with a standard Wordpress install aren’t exactly the most SEO (Search Engine Optimization) friendly if you’re running straight “out of the box”. Particularly the way Wordpress handles page titles for individual post pages. Below is an example of a standard Wordpress installs handling of the html “title” tag. As is common knowledge in the SEO community, beside your domain name, the actual title that appears in the titlebar of the browser is one of the most essential aspects for ranking your posts high in the search engines, especially true with Google who has recently started bumping new articles up in the rankings and gradually fading them as the article becomes less relevant. If you’re a blogger like me, most of my articles are not particualrly time sensitive, so it is essential to have an effective title for each individual post that will sustain higher rankings over along period of time.

To begin with, choosing a short, yet descriptive title is imperative to gaining high rankings for your targeted keyowrds. Stuffing your html title is a definite mistake because in many an SEO’s experience, Google has a knack for singling out the keywords you’re not particularly trying to get ranked for. The old adage K.I.S.S (Keep it Simple Stupid) absolutely applies to standard webpages but it the single most important trick you can use to get your posts ranked high and keep them there as long as your article’s content is relative to your title.

Below is an example of the standard Wordpress install’s code to generate your blog titles :

<title><?php bloginfo('name'); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> &raquo; Blog Archive <?php } ?> <?php wp_title(); ?></title>

With this standard code your individual blog post pages will have a very ugly and SEO unfriendly title as shown below…

Wordpress Title Example 1

A much better title for your individual posts would look like this…

Wordpress Title Example 2

To accomplish this, all you have to do is replace the standard code shown above with this much more SEO friendly code:
</p> <table width="580" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" style="border:#444444 1px solid;"> <tr> <td> <title><br /> <?php if ( is_single() ) {<br /> wp_title('', true);<br /> }else{<br /> bloginfo('name');<br /> wp_title();<br /> }?><br /> </title> </td> </tr> </table> <p>Depending on what theme you’re using, the file to edit will be in your /wp-content/themes/yourtheme directory and if there isn’t a file named header.php (which is the usual edit spot), you will be editing the file index.php.</p> <p>Happy <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Wordpress+Hack" style="font-weight: normal; color:#000000; text-decoration: none" rel="tag">Wordpress Hack</a>ing</p> </div> </div> <br /> <div class="social"> <span>If you enjoyed this article please consider <strong>sharing it!</strong></span> <a href="http://twitter.com/home/?status=Wordpress+Hack+%3A+SEO+Friendly+Titles   : http://www.affiliatebestprogram.com/wordpress-hack-seo-friendly-titles/" title="Tweet" target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> <img 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style="margin-top:-2px; font-size:.80em;">Subscribe to comments with <a href='http://www.affiliatebestprograms.com/wordpress-hack-seo-friendly-titles/feed/'><abbr title="Really Simple Syndication">RSS</abbr></a> or <a href="http://www.affiliatebestprograms.com/wordpress-hack-seo-friendly-titles/trackback/" rel="trackback">TrackBack</a>. </p> <br /> <ol class="commentlist"> <li class="alt" id="comment-1947"> <div class="commentname"> <a href='http://news.go4match.de/?p=9687'>Wordpress Hack : SEO Friendly Titles</a> on October 7th, 2007 </div> <div class='commenttext'> <div class="commentp"> <p>[…] unknown wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptWordpress is the greatest blogging software ever created, however there are a few issues with a standard Wordpress install aren’t exactly the most SEO (Search Engine Optimization) friendly if you’re running Wordpress straight “out of … […]</p> </div> </div> </li> </ol> <div class="navigation"> <div class="alignleft"></div> <div 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