Wordpress is an amazing program. Out of the box, it is very search engine friendly. In many cases… I believe it can be too search engine friendly. I have written some articles in the past that teach you how to prevent search engines from crawling certain sections of your blog. Today I want to add just another minor modification that you can make to your blog. This modification will help you get your articles to pull up better in the search results as well as make them look more appealing to people who stumble upon your listing in the search result pages.
This isn’t a lengthy discussion or a long and drawn out article. It’s pretty simple and dry cut, but the results will be amazing for you!
If you look at the title of an individual post you may see a title that looks similar to this:
Your Blog’s Name >> Blog Archive >> Post Title
What happens is that when your article is indexed in the search engines this same title is used as the title in the search results page. Here is an example:
The most important part of the title is cut off with the (…) truncation. Unfortunately, when your blog produces titles like this, you force all the most important keywords to the back of the title and even run a risk that keywords in the title drop off because of the character length of the post title. The above post’s title is as follows:
12 Ways To Use Facebook Professionally
But you would never know that because the word professionally got cut off. Consequently, if someone searches Google for “Facebook” and also uses the word “professional(ly)” in the search query. The chances that this post will come up are reduced because of how the title is formatted.
Wouldn’t it look nicer if the above example looked like this:
12 Ways To Use Facebook Professionally
Think of Facebook as a professional tool, and that’s what it is. It doesn’t matter how millions of high school and college students are using Facebook…
http://webworkerdaily.com/2007/07/24/12-ways-to-use-facebook-professionally/ -82K - Jul 29, 207
Which example will get more traffic? Which example will get more clicks? Which example looks more professional?
How do you want your post titles to look like in the search engines? Do you remember my Sexiest Blogger post I did yesterday? Check it out, see what it looks like in the search results: CLICK HERE or view example below:
That’s not a bad listing to have in the search results page. Especially only after one day from publication. My article ranks in 4th place. It’s above the top fold, and to be honest… its the better listing on the page. If you were looking for the sexiest blogger, which listing would appeal to you more?
It’s all in your current Wordpress theme’s header.php file. Follow these simple steps and you can have search engine friendly Wordpress titles too.
The default Wordpress theme’s title looks like this:
<title><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> » Blog Archive <?php } ?> <?php wp_title(); ?></title>
Your current theme’s title may vary.
<title>
<?php if (is_home()) { ?><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?><?php } ?>
<?php if (function_exists(’is_tag’) and is_tag()) { ?>Articles, news and information about <?php echo $tag; ?>.<?php } ?>
<?php if (is_single()) { ?><?php wp_title(”); ?><?php } ?>
<?php if (is_archive()) { ?><?php wp_title(”); ?><?php } ?>
<?php if (is_page()) { ?><?php wp_title(”); ?><?php } ?>
<?php if (is_search()) { ?><?php the_search_query(); ?><?php } ?>
</title>
That’s it! You can then open up your blog in your web browser and navigate to a post and view it in the browser’s title bar. Here is an example:
If you should have any comments, questions or suggestions, please feel free to drop me a comment using the comment form below.
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Date/Time: 7-30-2007 19:38:46 Comment #4057
Oh, hey, that’s cool. I’ve noticed when posting various articles on sites such as Blogg Buzz, my titles always come out like your first example.
I usually go in and manually fix them so they look right. I never thought of that happening with the search engines.
Great tip, I’ll be working on that tonight.
Thanks
Date/Time: 11-1-2007 09:17:49 Comment #6224
Great tip Garry! Thank you
I’ve put it in my header, but it’s still not working for me. Do I need to change my permalinks or something?
Date/Time: 11-9-2007 01:26:55 Comment #6442
Neat trick, Garry. In 2 minutes I had a sexier title. Thanks.
Date/Time: 3-27-2008 12:25:35 Comment #12854
Yes , I will definitely improve my titles now, it seems worth it