Optimizing Page Titles in WordPress
The Bivings Group is a busy web development firm, and as such we don’t always spend the time we should on our own websites. As a consultant, you focus so much on helping clients that sometimes you don’t spend the time to help yourself.
In an effort to improve the performance of our own online program, we are going to take some time this summer to update the content, graphics, etc. on our main site, our blog and the website of our principle product, ImpactWatch. One of the first things we are doing is looking at ways to improve our performance in search engines. Our sites do pretty well in Google, but, like anyone else, we want to do better. We know that search engine optimization (SEO) is an ongoing process, and that if we don’t consistently put in work our ratings will drop.
In an effort to improve our blog, today we installed a WordPress plugin called SEO Title Tag, which gives you complete control over the extremely important title tags that appear on each page of your site.
In WordPress, by default your title tags show your blog name followed by your post title. So, for this post, the default WordPress settings would produce a title tag that reads “The Bivings Report > Optimizing Page Titles in WordPress”. Search engines give more weight to the first part of the title, so for most people it is a waste to use that valuable real estate repeating the name of your blog on page after page. Plus, your browser and services like del.icio.us, Mento, etc. use the title tag to figure out what to call your post when you save it, so it also creates problems for users trying to browse for your content from third party tools. To give you an idea of the problem, check out the screenshot on the right showing what my browser history looks like from the WordPress website. Tough to distinguish the various pages from one another, huh?
We fixed this on The Bivings Report a while ago by altering our template so that our blog name appears after the post title. So for this post, our current default would be “Optimizing Page Titles in WordPress > The Bivings Report”, which prioritizes the post title over the blog name.
SEO Title Tag takes this concept further by letting you create title tags within WordPress that are completely different from your post titles. This is important because the role played by your post title is sometimes in conflict with the goal of a title tag. The plugin author sums up the difference pretty well by saying, “Post titles should be catchy, pithy, and short-and-sweet; whereas title tags should incorporate synonyms and alternate phrases to capture additional search visibility.”
This isn’t to suggest that you need to customize your title tags on every post. In fact, I chose not to change the title tag for this very post since I think it works well both for search engines and readers. I did, however, optimize the title tag on this post entitled John McCain, Strike Three. We changed the title tag to the more keyword rich “John McCain Launches Third Version of Campaign Website to Mixed Results”.
SEO Title Tag is a great tool for entries where you want a short and sweet post title for readers and a longer, keyword-rich title tag for search engines. Check it out.