Optimizing Word Press Title Tags

Many users of Word Press have found issues with their title tags that render their links poorly in the search engines.

These are the main problems that users wish to fix about the title tags are:

.) Place post title before the blog title
.) Remove the dash (or ») when there is not post title.
.) Users wish to remove the “»” altogether from the title tags.

Let’s start with the first issue of changing the order of display in the Word Press title tags. For SEO purposes, you would be better off having the title of your actual post appear in the TITLE tag first, like: “Post Title » Blog Title” rather than the other way around.

To make this change, go into the theme editor of your Word Press admin and click into the heder.php file. In the top of the file look for the section that starts with “<title>”.

First, remove everything from between the <title> tag to the </title>. This should result in your TITLE tags looking like this:

<title>
</title>

Next, add the following lines of code into their own lines between the TITLE tags so that your TITLE section looks like this:

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

Now if you go back and look at your site’s pages you will see that we have reversed the order of the TITLE tag, placing the post title in front of the blog’s title. However, this is still not perfect, as you will see that the the “»” appears in front of the post title on your post pages, rather than in between the post title and the blog title as it is intended.

To fix this issue, go back to the theme editor for the header.php file and again find the TITLE section of the file near the top.

We are going to again add some code to that section of the header.php file. Add the following code to TITLE section so that your TITLE section looks like this:

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

You will find that this almost solves the problem, by placing the “»” in between the post title and the blog title where it belongs; however this still leaves another instance of the “»” at the very front of the TITLE tags on the blog pages.

To fix this we have to make another small change to the TITLE section of the header.php file from the theme editor of the admin panel.

The title tag we’ve been editing this far is actually abbreviated PHP code. There are some definable variables that are being allowed to fall back to their default states as defined by the main Word Press code. Because we haven’t indicated for the script to act otherwise, the script is falling back to its default behavior.

To fix this issue, we are now going to change the first line of the TITLE section in the header.php file to the following:

<?php wp_title(' ' ; ?>

Your entire TITLE section of the header.php file should now look like this:

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

This will now have your TITLE tags acting the way you want them to, with the post title being listed first and the blog title listed second. This also removes the separation from the title tags, when there is no post title for pages like the home page.

The only thing left is to change the separator from the “»” to another symbol.

To do this, you have to change the separator in the new TITLE section of your header.php page.

In your new TITLE section, you will see the following (I have bolded the part you are looking for):

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

You need to change the “&raquo;” to any other character that you wish. You may use a character entity chart to select a different separator, or you can go with a simple pipe (|) character the choice is up to you.

On my blog, I have chosen to use a simple pipe delimiter format like this:

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

Please let me know if there are any other issue that you find with the TITLE tags in Word Press, and I will see if I can help you solve them.

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