The title tag of a web page in SEO practice is one of the most important factors to consider. It is so important that search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing tend to use it as a link in their search results pages and it also appears as link anchor text in a lot of social bookmarking sites. Knowing these things can give you a great advantage when it comes to getting your site to rank better in the search engines. By default most WordPress post titles are displayed in a non-optimized way. Today I am going to show you how some easy modifications can give you a nice SEO-friendly title for your blog posts.
Notice how the titles that are circled in green match the search query “how to fix a leaky faucet” very well. This makes them relevant to your search and more apt to get your click and have you visit their site. The one in red is close but it doesn’t match exactly so it’s a little bit less relevant. Although the words “repair” and “fix” are still closely related they do not make an exact match.
A good rule of thumb is to try and match your page title with the search query as closely as possible. Notice how the page title comes first and then the website name is last? This is what you want to shoot for when trying to make your titles more SEO friendly. The problem with WordPress is that it is typically in reverse. The website or blog title is first and then the post title is last.
The easy way to fix this is with the WordPress plugin All In One SEO Pack. Simply install it on your WordPress and enable it! The default settings will usually work just fine but you can always customize it to your exact needs. What this plugin does right out of the box is rewrite your page titles and blog post titles from the default version of “%blog_title% | %post_title%” format to the more SEO friendly version “%post_title% | %blog_title%” without you having to make changes to the WordPress code.
Was this post helpful? Do you have some ideas for changing the titles of your posts? Leave your feedback in the comments section below!
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