SEO Friendly Titles for Wordpress

[MajorTom]

When you're optimizing a site for the search engines, the actual title in the title bar is the most important element. Unfortunately, a standard Wordpress install creates ugly titles for your individual posts.

I wrote an article on how to edit your Wordpress software to fix that...

<removed link>

Hope this might be useful for any Wordpress users out there.

[scnsp]

Good tips. I use similar method for my blogs.

For me, I only put the blog name as title for the home page and all other pages like single post and categories will get their post name or category name as the page title.

[Mittineague]

Not bad. Any idea on how to get rid of the 2 leading spaces? The wp_title function wraps the separator in spaces, and the 2 spaces are then prefixed to the title and returned. I tried trim(), but no go.

[Dan Grossman]

Not bad. Any idea on how to get rid of the 2 leading spaces? The wp_title function wraps the separator in spaces, and the 2 spaces are then prefixed to the title and returned. I tried trim(), but no go.

trim() will work if you set the second argument of wp_title to false. That determines whether the function echos or returns a string.

echo trim(wp_title('', false)); 

[Mittineague]

:do'h: I didn't think that the function either echos or returns based on the value of the argument until after I signed off. But yes, that does it.
I notice that the "standard" un-hacked URL for the index page title has 2 trailing spaces. So that makes me wonder if the spaces are all that important SEO-wise? Or just something else to bug my perfectionist tendencies?

[scnsp]

Thanks for bringing this up. I am not aware of the 2 leading space problem until now. So I just added the trim() to the wp_title to remove it even though I don't think it will affect the SEO of the blog. Thanks guys.

[mails]

Good tip thanks. I've used Optimized Title Plugin untill now...

Mails

[macroer]

thanks, good tip.

[Lastbutnotleast]

For SEO friendly URL :

go to Options

then Permalinks

then select custom and insert this:

/&#37;category%/%postname%

next to custom structure

click save and you have search engine friendly urls for your blog pages

[Pennywise]

Just download the all in one seo pack plugin

[MajorTom]

Not bad. Any idea on how to get rid of the 2 leading spaces? The wp_title function wraps the separator in spaces, and the 2 spaces are then prefixed to the title and returned. I tried trim(), but no go.

This should work...

$string_to_trim = preg_replace("/^\s\s/", "", $string_to_trim);

That's just a regular expression to anchor at the beginning of the string (^) and trim two white spaces (\s\s). $string_to_trim is the string you need to trim the white spaces from.

For SEO friendly URL :
go to Options
then Permalinks
then select custom and insert this:
/%category%/%postname%
next to custom structure
click save and you have search engine friendly urls for your blog pages

That's a good point but we're not talking about the url, we're talking about the title in the html output. Im assuming most people already have permalinks enabled. As an example of how and why what I'm doing works for SEO, if you Google "iWebTool Affiliate Program" (my post from October 3), my post is already on the first page of Google.

Just download the all in one seo pack plugin

That's all fine and dandy but the point of a "hack" is to learn how to code and learn how the Wordpress software operates, not to be dependent on code other people wrote.

[Thing]

Here is the code I use for my title tags:

 <title>
  <?php wp_title(' '); ?>
  <?php if(wp_title(' ', false)) { echo ' -'; } ?>
  <?php bloginfo('name'); ?>
 </title>

which displays as:

POST TITLE - BLOG NAME

[MajorTom]

That's similar to the code I posted on my blog which the moderators here deemed worthy to remove the link. The only reason I posted a link instead of posting the full article was because of fears of winding up in the duplicate content filter. Anyway, here's the code...

<title>
<?php if ( is_single() ) {
wp_title('', true);
}else{
bloginfo('name');
wp_title();
}?>
</title>

Depending on what theme you’re using, the file to edit will be in your /wp-content/themes/yourtheme directory and if there isn’t a file named header.php (which is the usual edit spot), you will be editing the file index.php.

Happy Wordpress Hacking

[Mittineague]

I tried this in my theme's header.php file and it works OK

    <title><?php if ( is_single() )
    {
        echo trim(wp_title('', false));
    } else {
        bloginfo('name');
        wp_title();
    } ?></title>

I'm still wondering, do " <-- outside spaces --> " affect SEO or do most already trim() anyway? It seems the spaces aren't in any browser title bar, but that's the browser.

[Dan Grossman]

Ever seen a page title in the SERPs with a bunch of spaces anywhere in it? Nope, they deal with ignoring 'em fine

[Mittineague]

Now that I think about it, the spaces I've seen as "%20"s were, AFAIK, in links to pdf (and doc ?) files. So they were probably put there from an app.

[Dan Grossman]

&#37;20 is a urlencoded space... if someone is urlencoding text for a page title, they're just confused

[cpvr]

Well, how many of you guys have the blog post name as your description too?

IE: Welcome to blog, blog name