Maneel’s Blog

Okay, I am not a wordpress expert but I have been using it for over 3 years now and I know my basics. Titles are one of the most important factors that influence your blog/website’s SEO. If you’re using wordpress, here are a few tips to optimise your page & post titles to make them more reader recall-able (I am not sure if that term exists, but still…) and more search engine friendly.
Genreally this is how your titles are, the defaults:

Homepage
Blog Name – Blog Description
Maneel’s Blog – I Came. I Saw. I Blogged.

Single Pages (includes posts, pages & categories)
Blog Name – Category Name
Maneel’s Blog – Academics
Blog Name – Post Name
Maneel’s Blog – Twitter Tips

All of these have the blog name preceding the actual post/page/category name, and trust me search engines hate this, because the blog becomes more important than the content in the above scenario (the above is good, but only from the structural point of view)

Instead, it should give more importance to the content. So, blog name should follow the content title.

To change, go to Dashboard >> Appearance >> Editor >> Header (header.php)

Replace everything between the <title> and </title> tags with the following code.

<?php
if (is_home ()) {
echo get_bloginfo(‘name’).’ – ‘.get_bloginfo(‘description’);
} else {
echo wp_title(‘-’, true, ‘right’).get_bloginfo(‘name’);
}
?>

Your new titles look like this

Homepage
Blog Name – Blog Description
Maneel’s Blog – I Came. I Saw. I Blogged.

Single Pages (includes posts, pages & categories)
Category Name – Blog Name
Academics – Maneel’s Blog
Post Name – Blog Name
Twitter Tips – Maneel’s Blog

I made the changes before I made this post, so I am not experimenting on you people. It works for my other blogs which is one of the reasons I’ve decided to introduce this here. If you decide to go on with this, let me know how well it works for you.