A few of you have have recently asked how to improve the <title> tag within a blog entry, so that it is search engine friendly, because as standard the title is shown as:
Your Blog Title. Your Blog Description » Your Blog Entry Title
Ah Ha I have a solution, but before you make any changes, please take a copy of your header.php file which will be found in the theme folder. Copy this to your hard drive, in case you mess up the original file.
1. Open up the header.php file from the theme folder
2. Find the <title> </title> tag
3. Delete the <title> </title> tag
4. Replace it with the code below
5. Save the new version of header.php
<title><?php if(is_home()) : ?>
<?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?> <?php bloginfo(‘description’); ?>
</title><?php else : ?><?php wp_title(”, display); ?>
| Some Random Text</title>
<?php endif; ?>
Basically the code is saying, if it’s the homepage of your blog show the title as:
Your Blog Title. Your Blog Description
Next the code is saying, if the page is not the homepage of your blog, show the title as:
Your Blog Entry Title | Some Random Text
Where the “Some Random Text” is you can literally put any keywords in there, but remember that some of the search engines will only list the first 60 characters of your Title so try and keep it from looking like spam.
If you have any questions, or comments then please feel free to leave them below, and I will try and help you with any difficulties.
Wow, that was so easy! Thanks!
Thanks for the tips Darren.
Darren,
You are the man. THis was helpful in reducing my spammy looking article titles
No worries Tony – glad I could help.
Darren, is ‘some random text’ for search engines or people? That is, should it be a sensible sentence snippet or simply a comma-deliniated series of keywords?
Thanks,
Kat
Hi Kat,
I think a small snippet sentence is better, as it doesn’t look spammy. My snippet is Blog Promotion Advice. You could put blog, promotion, advice but in my opinion it makes it look a little spammy.
Hope this helps
Thanks for this tutorial, by the way darren, because my blog when i search in the internet, the indexed pages has the same description, how I can correct that such that the other pages have their own description not the default coming from the tagline. Sorry if it is off-topic.