I’ll be focusing on optimizing the page title for a WordPress blog. Along the way, I guess there’s useful info for optimising the page title of any website.

Maybe I’ll write a future post on general tips for optimizing a page title…

Anyway, this shows the importance of placing keywords in your page title.

This will give your site a good rank in search engines. I’ll use my fantasy + classical art blog as an example.

1. The Page Title

galeon submit art

This page of The Galeon is for visitors who’d like their artwork to be featured on the art blog.

This is the current version of my page title.

The following screenshot shows a previously indexed version of the page, but still puts the point across.

2. Tweak the Page Title for Good SEO

When you type in “submit artwork blog” — The Galeon’s “Submit Artwork” page is #1. Yippee. I’m happy as long as it’s on the first page (but of course, #1 of the first page is very nice).

good seo

Try to place your most important keywords nearer to the left. The search engine tends to read the keywords in titles in order of importance that way.

This is why you should always put your blog/website name right behind (if you do include it), instead of the front, where your all-important unique keywords should be.

3. Don’t just change <title>blahx3</title>

The damn page title and meta description gave me a big headache, as I *thought* I had done it correctly.

This is what I did at first. I simply added the page title that I wanted, and the meta description (what is below the page title, in search engine results) to header.php.

wordpress title

And this is what happened in Google –

meta galeon

The page title and meta were the same for every page. Not good, not good. You don’t want the same description appearing for all posts/pages.

4. How to Tweak Page Title in WordPress

Luckily, I managed to find How To Make Your WordPress Titles Search Engine Friendly, an article written by Garry Conn. The code he switched to is the best ever.

* HAVE A BACK-UP COPY of your original files before changing anything! *

Open header.php — look for the <title></title> section.

Example:

cleaker header

Replace that portion with this:

<title><?php if (is_home()) { ?><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?><?php } ?><?php if (is_single()) { ?><?php wp_title(''); ?><?php } ?><?php if (is_archive()) { ?><?php wp_title(''); ?> - <?php bloginfo(’name’); ?><?php } ?><?php if (is_page()) { ?><?php wp_title(''); ?> - <?php bloginfo(’name’); ?><?php } ?><?php if (is_search()) { ?><?php the_search_query(); ?> - <?php bloginfo(’name’); ?><?php } ?></title>

If you want to go insane pulling your hair out tweak it further, you can fiddle around, and see what you come up with.

The <title></title> attributes for The Galeon now look like this.

header now

Basically, I fiddled around with all the sections.

My home page title is “Fantasy, Classic Art Blog - Drawings, Paintings, Poems » The Galeon” (try to keep it around 65 characters maximum. Any longer and it’ll get cut off in search engines, and look ugly).

Page title for a single post is “title of single post | Art Blog » The Galeon”.

<?php if (is_archive()) { ?> covers the page title for categories, tags, and archives (by month, year, etc).

5. End Notes

This gives you better control over the page title, for your WP posts and pages.

The meta description is for you to add whatever content about your site, that you couldn’t fit into the page title. Page title contains keywords — you can use a sentence or two for the meta description.

For the meta description for The Galeon homepage, I downloaded Another WordPress Meta Plugin, after reading Implementing Custom Descriptions in WordPress. I didn’t want a meta description for every single post, so that plugin worked just fine for me.

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