March 29, 2009 in Search Engine Tips by admin

How optimize wordpress title through the header title tag without a plugin

This is question that new wordpress bloggers often ask. Some may think it’s okay to have the wordpress default title tag while some may find it very important to change the title tag to some different, something so called “Search Engine Friendly” title. I myself think it is a good idea to change the default wordpress title tag to something else. If you look at the default wordpress titles, for each article you write, you will find the title being generated something like:

“Blog Name” >> Blog Archive >> “Blog Post Title”

This is because of the default wordpress title tag, which looks something like:

<title><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> &raquo; Blog Archive <?php } ?> <?php wp_title(); ?></title>

In order to make it more search engine friendly, you can modify this default title tag to something else using the wordpress conditional tags, which will be called your custom title tag. You can use your own imagination here. Check out this page on wordpress.org where you will find detailed explanation on all conditional tags you can use while customizing the title.

To give you a picture of how these conditional tags is used, here is the custom title tag that I have used on this blog.

<title><?php if (is_home () ) { bloginfo(‘name’); echo ” – “; bloginfo(’description’);}
elseif ( is_category() ) { single_cat_title(); echo ” at ” ; bloginfo(‘name’); }
elseif (is_single() ) { single_post_title();}
elseif (is_page() ) { bloginfo(‘name’); echo ” – “; single_post_title();}
elseif (is_archive() ) {echo “Archives for “; wp_title(”); echo ” at “; bloginfo(‘name’);}
elseif (is_search()) {echo “Search Results for ‘”; echo $s; echo “‘ at “; bloginfo(‘name’);}
elseif (is_404()) {echo “404 Page Not Found – “; bloginfo(‘name’);}
elseif (is_page()) {echo wp_title(”); echo ” at “; bloginfo(‘name’);}
else { wp_title(‘’,true); } ?></title>

You can start from here and change it to whatever that suits your seo needs. And when you have come up with an even better title tag, do share so that we can all benefit from it. Hope you like it.