Before we actually move in to optimizing the titles in wordpress I want to let you know the importance of titles in your blog and importance of it in search engine rankings, When you do a search in search engines like Google there are three aspects in the results page that you will tend to notice, The first thing that you notice is the page Title, secondly the page description and thirdly the url.
When search engines index a page and also when it brings up the appropriate result for a particular query first it will take the page’s title in to consideration and later on goes to the page description and then to the actual url of the page.
Even though you might have appropriate content for a particular user query in search engines if you don’t have appropriate title to support that content then your page might not rank well for the appropriate query making your particular blog post invaluable so you should make sure you are choosing the best title for your content.
Now we will see how we can optimize our titles better for SEO. As I told you initially first need is that you need to have a title that really supports your content, if your title and content don’t match each other then there is a high chance that people may not spend much time on your page and your bounce rate might go up. I prefer to recommend the usage of headspace plugin to optimize your urls for SEO. So once you have installed the plugin follow these directions to optimize your titles.
Once you get to your headpace settings after you have installed and activated the plugin you should see these both options called posts and pages.
Just click and expand both posts and pages and enter %%title%% | Blog Title I know that some may just copy and paste the “blog title” part of the code too thinking that wordpress will automatically detect your blog title if you use this code, but the answer is NO, just substitute the blog title to the title of your blog and the reason why you should do this is because it helps to promote your brand name in search results indrectly and Google or any other search engines don’t mind you using your blog titles in the actual titles of the blog posts or page and you might have noticed that sites like ehow and many many other major sites on internet already use their blog title in their titles and it helps them to build their brand name and when you can achieve it so easily why not you do the same?
Just a screenshot to show you what will be result like after you have optimized your titles with the instructions given here will actually look like in search results.
You can do the same for your categories, archives, tags by entering the following code in the appropriate section in headspace.
For Categories: %%category%% Archives %%page%% | Blog Title
For Tags: %%tag%% Archives %%page%% | Blog Title
For Archives: Blog Archives %%page%% | Blog Title
Download the headspace 2 plugin
Note:1. some people prefer to use lines “-” over pipes “|” it really doesn’t have any effect on the SEO value of your pages or in the way your pages are ranked so I totally leave that option to you, if you prefer to use lines its just fine over pipes.
2. Its good practice to limit your title characters to 70 at the maximum as search engines only allot a total space of 70 characters at most when they display results for queries.
Tags: meta title tag wordpress, meta title tags, optimizing titles for seo
Related posts:
I am Chakkravarthi, full time Blogger, webmaster and wordpress enthusiast . Apart from blogging I like to dwell in to SEO world most of the time.Use wordpress and support the open source community.