A Vital WordPress Plugin – SEO Title Tag
Pop quiz, WordPress is fantastic, but it has a serious flaw when it comes to search engine optimization…
Q. Do you know what SEO flaw is?
A. It uses the post’s title as the page’s HTML title tag.
From the plugin website (which I completely agree with)…
Title tags are arguably the most important of the on-page factors for search engine optimization (â€SEOâ€). It blows my mind how post titles are also used as title tags by WordPress, considering that post titles should be catchy, pithy, and short-and-sweet; whereas title tags should incorporate synonyms and alternate phrases to capture additional search visibility.
You see a post’s title is meant to show up at the beginning of your article and draw the reader into the story, but an HTML title tag has another job that is directed to search engine spiders and not humans.
Placing a keyword phrase at the beginning of your HTML title tag can make a big difference in your rankings. Plain and simple. Savvy WordPress authors have been left with a dilemma: create awkward looking, but SEO friendly post titles, or compromise search engine rankings so that your readers don’t think you are illiterate?
Here’s an example of the power of keyword in the title tag (click to enlarge).
You see that my post is second (Amazon has enough trust out rank me even without using the keyword in the title) ahead of the software author’s site. Our sites have the same page rank and are about the same age, but his title is not optimized for the word “Nemeas” which is the name of an application.
Now there’s a plugin which fixes all that and rescues angst ridden WordPress writers from this potentially angst inducing problem.
With this plugin, which I’ve just installed today, so don’t expect any detailed how-to’s, you can now think of your post titles as simply for your on page readers and enter a completely different title to be used as the HTML title tag on your page.
5 Quick Tips for SEOing Your Title Tags
You can easily get carried away with this type of thing, and any SEO in general, but some effort in this direction could be worth a lot.
1. On any type of money post, or search engine traffic pulling post, pick a primary keyword to target.
2. Do this by using a keyword tool (free or advanced) and get an idea of the traffic potential of your phrase.
3. Select a reasonable target. For example a product name is reasonable for post from an established site, but a phrase like “make money online” is not going to achievable for one post from any site (it will be “won” only by a domain home page). You may want to do a quick scan in Google for the competition level for your keyphrase to help your decision making process.
4. Put the keyword phrase in as the first word(s) in the title tag for the post.
5. Complete the title tag by using the post’s actual title, or another phrase that will pull people into the post. This phrase is going to be seen by someone on a search engine results page, so it is the only chance you have to draw them into your site.
6. Do the 5 steps above for every significant post on your site, especially your achieves and watch your traffic from the search engines explode.
[tip: if you are using the WP-Cache plugin, you'll have to delete your cache before the new titles will show up.]
People who are good at keyword targeting their posts and writing great HTML title tags to entice searchers to click in will enjoy a big advantage in traffic and profit on their blogs.
This process becomes even more important when you factor in the fact that visitors coming from search engines are know to convert higher (buy stuff, click on ads etc.) than your regular readers (it only makes sense since they are searching for something to purchase or solve a problem.)
Grab the SEO Title Tag Plugin and boost that traffic today!
You can see it in action on this post. Compare the post title to the title on the top of your browser to see the keyword phrase that I’ve targeted and how it differs from the post title.
Browse Timeline
Comments ( 6 )
[...] A Vital WordPress Plugin – SEO Title Tag [...]
Article Recap for May in $100 Blogging Project added these pithy words on Jun 01 07 at 9:52 amRich Minx added these pithy words on May 28 07 at 8:40 amHi Jon,
Just a thought (they occur rarely so I’d better note it down): have you thought about offering some kind of SEO diagnostics service on a per-site basis? Then use the case studies in your blog?
Jon added these pithy words on May 28 07 at 11:56 amFunny you should mention that RM. I’ve been wanting to dive into the “review my site” thang, but looking for an original angle and had thought about that type of “prize” for the winning (or a randomly drawn) review each month. Still thinking about what exactly to offer, but yes I like the idea.
Scott added these pithy words on Jun 06 07 at 1:15 amWould you say that SEO Title Tag is better than “All in One SEO”? Or do they essentially perform the same function
Jon added these pithy words on Jun 06 07 at 8:59 amScott, I hadn’t see “All in One SEO” before, but I just went and took a look. The SEO Title Tag looks like it only does a part of what All in One SEO does, so yours may be a better solution. I’d test it first though because from reading the comments it looks like there can be some problems with it conflicting with other plugins.
Jen added these pithy words on Nov 15 07 at 2:19 pmThis information is just what I needed. I’m not technical and have a new blog which were indexed very quickly by google but all of the pages seemed to have the same title description. I know how important having the proper web page titles are but was stumped about how it should be done with blogs.