Use the Right Title in Building a WordPress Website
If you are building your wordpress website you want it to be found be the search engines right?
Well one thing that you need to think hard about is the title of your website. That title will show on every search engine search result page that shows the link to the homepage of your website.
The title should not only contain the keywords you want to target, but it should also invite searchers to click on that title.
The WordPress Title
Most themes will show the title as the title of your post or page, with or without the title of the site as you have set it under -> Settings -> General.
What I use for most of my and my customers sites is a pluging called Headspace2 which give you the possibility to write different “HTML Titles”. Those HTML Titles are the titles that are shown in the title bar of your browser and are also the ones used by search engines.
With Headspace you can set different titles for your homepage, and for several other pages like archive and category pages. It shows a separate field under your writing panel where you can put that special title.
On this page you see the title “Use the Right Title in Building a WordPress Website” but if you look at the top of your browser you see the title “The Importance of Using the Right Title when Building a WordPress Website”.
The WordPress Theme Header
But there is a little catch for Headspace2 to work the right way…. you need to check the way you theme uses the Title function in you header file.
To check that go to Appearance -> Editor > Select the file called Header (header.php) and look for coding like:
<title><?php if (function_exists(‘seo_title_tag’)) { seo_title_tag(); } else { wp_title(”); bloginfo(‘name’);} ?></title>
In the example above you could use a plugin called seo title tag that will do the same as Headspace2, but has some limitations. You can also see that the name of the site is appended at the end of the title. You need to change that code for optimal use of Headspace2 and you need to replace it with:
<title><?php wp_title (”); ?></title>
For branding purpose you could add something extra in the that code like <title><?php wp_title (”); ?> | WpSiteBuilding.com</title> where the last text is always appended to the title. The only problem with this is the fact the the title will get to long for the search engine listings. Search engines will cut the title at this moment to about 60 positions.
So, did you install the plugin and changed the title function in the header of your theme? Then it is time to read up on how you can write those great visitor attracting Title over at Copybloggers How to Write Magnetic Headlines
P.s The code wp_title is taken from your database table, if you have another table prefix you have to change the prefix to match your installation (WordPress Installation)
November 1, 2009 by Herbert-Jan van Dinther · Leave a Comment
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