Ok, maybe the post title should have read “A good page title is worth a #1 ranking in the SERPs” but that wouldn’t have been as catchy would it?

Believe it or not, the text you place inside of your title tag (<title>My Title Here</title>) plays a very important role when it comes to SEO. Not only does this often overlooked tag determine the link text displayed in search engine results pages (SERPs), but the title tag also factors heavily into the calculation of your placement within the SERPs themselves.

Many stock WordPress themes do not optimize page titles out-of-the box, which leaves most SEO minded users (like me) at a disadvantage from the very start. As a first attempt at remedying this situation I modified my WordPress header using a simple php tweak.

Here is what I ended up with:

<title>
        <?php
                if(is_home())
                {
                        bloginfo(‘name’);
                        echo(‘ - ‘);
                        bloginfo(‘description’);
                }
                else
                {
                        wp_title(‘ ‘);
                        if(wp_title(‘ ‘, false)) {
                                echo(‘ - ‘);
                        }
                        bloginfo(‘name’);
                }
        ?>
</title>

The translation goes:

  • If we are at the home page, display the blog name followed by a “-“ and then the blog description (i.e. SEO Ladder – Learning how to make money on the Internet one rung at a time.).
  • Else if we are on any another page display the post title followed by a slash (if the post title was not blank) and then finally add in the blog name (i.e. A page Title is worth a thousand SERPs – SEO Ladder)

I have read a few posts stating that duplicating the post title in the page title is a no-no when going for true optimization. I also ran across a number of WordPress plug-ins that allow you to tweak page titles on a post-by-post level; allowing for the insertion of targeted keywords. I decided to stick with the solution above for a while and see how it impacts my ranking. I do plan to revisit this area in the future and might end up testing out a few page title plug-ins in the process.