How to Optimize WordPress Titles for SEO

By default, your WordPress will come with the following code in your header.php file.

<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> » Blog Archive < ?php } ?> <?php wp_title(); ?>
*located between the title tags.

This code generates a title that looks something like :

“Bo’s Blog >> How to Be Like Bo”

First, it displays your blog title, followed by the title of the post. If you do nothing, you will end up with search engine listings like this one. This is a Google listing of my dear friend, Joel’s site. I’m using his site an example with his permission.

Do you see the listing have same titles? This is not the way you want. Also note the dates appearing as your first keyword. Joel forgot to setup permalink feature, so his url contains letters and numbers by default.

In this post, I will show you how to have a search engine listing that has your post topic as your main title followed by the blog title(optional). Take a look at my listings from Google and MSN. For the first screenshot, I forgot to put a dash between the title and the blog title. Second screenshot is what you might want to accomplish. Please note I removed the date info to make it look better. And..I don’t use meta keywords and descriptions. I let the spiders decide what the page is about.

So let’s begin.

Open your header.php file from your template folder. Then find :

< ?php bloginfo('name'); ?> < ?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> » Blog Archive < ?php } ?> < ?php wp_title(); ?>
*between the title tags

You will going to replace this with the following code.

< ?php wp_title(''); ?>< ?php if(is_single()) {;?> - < ?php } ?> Put Your Blog Title here
*remove the space before “?php” tag

Let’s take a look at one code at a time.

< ?php wp_title(''); ?>

This function will display the title of your post. It is important that you put two single quotes inside the brackets.

< ?php if(is_single()) {;?> - < ?php } ?>

This functions tells WordPress to show the dash only when the page is a post page. If it’s your home page, it will not display.

Put Your Blog Title Here

This is where you put your blog title. Make it short and keyword rich. This ignores the blog title setup from your control panel. We can use a function here as well, but I like to do some manual coding for my site. :)

There are other ways to implement this code, but I will leave it up to you to experiment. If you need help, please let me know.