Homepage titles - make it relevant

Why does an optimized homepage title for your blog offer great value to your SEO efforts and adds visibility to your whole blog?

The homepage title is one of the most important factors when it comes to SEO. You can easily find proof of this. Go to google.com and type in anything you like. Look at the first few results and you will see that these sites do have your search query near the beginning of their page title and they do have it within the page content.

We will now come to how to change the default setting of how WordPress displays the homepage title to a highly optimized manner without using a plugin for that.

By default, most WordPress themes will show the homepage title like this:

YOUR BLOG TITLE » YOUR POST TITLE

This is defined in the header.php within the respective themes folder. You will find the following near the top of the file: (without the spaces, I added.)

<title><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?> » <?php wp_title(); ?></title>

This is not very optimal for SEO purposes. bloginfo(’name’) is the title of your blog and wp_title(); represents the title of a single post. We want to have the post title being shown before the blog title.

Changing this into a more optimized presentation of your titles is very easy.
You just have to move your post title before your blog title. That´s it.
All you have to do is to open the header.php from the themes folder of the theme you are actually using.

Find this code near the top of the file:

<title><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?> » <?php wp_title(); ?></title>

and change it to: (again, skip the spaces I added!)

<title><?php wp_title(); ?> » <?php bloginfo(’name’); ?></title>

Now save the file and upload it to its themes folder. No second step, we are done. Look at the top of your browser window. This page is titled

What will be more important when someone would search for it? I moved the post title to the beginning and slightly changed the title. By default, this page would have been titled

If you want to learn more about this, please read these great articles related to this topic:

• How To: Make Search Engines Like Your WordPress Blog
• Wordpress Hacking for Better Blog Titles
• SEO A Wordpress Blog - The Optimal Title
• Blog SEO - How to Optimize Your Blog for the Search Engines
• Reverse Blog Name and Post Title in WordPress Title
• Better SEO Page Title for WordPress
• SEO for Wordpress
• Google your Wordpress Blog

Please let me know, whether this was useful for you or not. Thank you.

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title tag, blog seo

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