WordPress SEO Tips - the Title Tag

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For anybody who cares about Search Engine Optimization (which you should if you own a website) WordPress is a great tool that takes care of most SEO problems by itself, the only significant oversight when they put it together was the TITLE tag.

There are few common mistakes most web designers make with regards to the TITLE tag, but WordPress in particular does some things that we should avoid. Let’s take a look at a few common mistakes and how to fix them in your own WP blog.

Duplicate Titles

Each TITLE tag should be unique for your website, with rich text describing the content of your blog. WordPress makes the mistake of repeating the blog title every time in the post, along with the category and then the title. For example:

thisismyurl.com | WordPress | WordPress SEO Tips – The Title Tag

That’s a surefire way to make Google think that you’re repeating the same content. What you should have for a page title is:

WordPress SEO Tips – The Title Tag

Except in the categories which should be:

thisismyurl.com | WordPress Archives

On the homepage, simply:

thisismyurl.com

If you want, you can include the site description if it’s short enough but remember to keep your site titles below 65 characters (including spaces).

What about your site name? If you really feel the need to include it in your page title, including it at the end (

WordPress SEO Tips – The Title Tag | thisismyurl.com 

) is the best.

65 Characters

Google only reads the first 65 characters of your title for it’s index, if you’re going to post longer titles you risk having them cut off in the index.

Keywords in the Title

A few years ago, there was a trend among web developers to stuff as many keywords as possible into the title. For example:

WordPress SEO Tips – The Title Tag SEO WordPress Optimizing Search Engine Optimization

Frankly, Google hires some pretty smart people so if you honestly think stuffing your titles with keywords is a good idea, you should think again. More importantly, repeating the same word or words in your title doesn’t make a difference to search engines. On the other hand, if you really wanted to make an impact try using a useful title such as:

WordPress SEO Tips – The Title Tag for Search Engine Optimization

Fixing WordPress

So now that you know a few new (and hopefully interesting) facts about how Search Engines will index your WordPress website, how do you fix it? The process is surprisingly simple, open your header.php file and change remove the existing title tag, to replace it with the code below:

<title><?php wp_title(”); ?> <?php if ( !(is_404()) && (is_single()) or (is_page()) or (is_archive()) ) { ?> | <?php } ?> <?php bloginfo(’name’); ?></title>