Optimizing your Title Tag for SEO on 3 Different Platforms

This post has been submitted by regular contributor – Aaron Brazell

A lot has been made of SEO as it comes to blogging, both here at Problogger and elsewhere. If you are a regular reader of this site, then this is especially critical to you. You read this blog because you want to know how to most effectively leverage your blog to make money. A lot of those earnings will come on the back of traffic from search engines.

A few weeks ago, we looked at how to get a very effective integration of Adsense into your WordPress-based blog. I realized as I interacted with you in the comments that my affinity for WordPress would help many out but that there are a large portion of you who use non-WordPress solutions.

Today, there’s another tip I’d like to pass along – one that Darren turned me onto and that I have been implementing across my blogs. It’s optimizing your <title> tag for Search Engines. Specifically, how to implement a “Entry Title – Blog Description” style title scheme. This time, I’ll cover more than WordPress.

The Importance of Title Tags

I’m preaching to the choir when I tell you that title tags are important. They could very well be the most important piece of your blog. We know a couple of things about title tags.

1. Title tags describe a page. They are a one line summary of what the page is about. The common (and semantic) understanding of the tag is to wrap the title of the site. Unfortunately for many people, the title of the site is completely un-descriptive of the content of the blog. For example, my blog is called “Technosailor”. If I put this in the title tag, search engines really have no clue as to the content of my site. It means nothing to spiders. It would be much better for SEO to place a keyword-rich description (e.g. “Technology, Blogging and Politics”) in the title tag.
2. It’s the Title Used in SERPs! The content of your title tag is what will be displayed in search engine results. Before I optimized Technosailor to use a “Entry Title – Blog Description” titling scheme, I had results like this in Google:

   

Okay, Title Tags are Good, but How Do I Tweak Them?

Depending on the blog platform you use, and the theme/template in use there are a few options.

WordPress

For WordPress, most themes include a header.php file. This is an optional file that developers do not have to use, but almost universally do. Because WordPress has some cool template tags that help determine what kind of page the current one is, we can use this to figure out how to display the title accordingly. Just replace your <title> tag with something similar to this:

<?php
  if(is_home())
  {
  	echo'<title>';
  	bloginfo('description');
  	wp_title();
  	echo'</title>';
  }
  else
  {
  	echo'<title>';
  	the_title();
  	echo ' » ';
  	bloginfo('description');
  	echo '</title>';
  }
?>

This block of code is used at That Damn PC but can be adjusted or tweaked based on your own preferences. It simply determines if the current page is the home page. If it is, then the <title> tag will be displayed in the form:

<title>Tips and Tricks to help you Master Your Computer</title>

On all other pages, You might see a title such as:

<title>Windows System Data &raquo; Tips and Tricks to help you Master Your Computer</title>

Moveable Type

Moveable Type handles things a bit differently. With Moveable Type, there are actually two different templates that must be edited to achieve this same result. From the Templates page, edit your Main Index template. Change the line with your <title> tag to reflect this:

<title><$MTBlogDescription$></title>

Save that and open up your Individual Entry Archive. To achieve the same result as the above example, change your <title> tag line to read:

<title><$MTEntryTitle remove_html="1"$> &raquo; <$MTBlogDescription$></title>

You can actually tweak your other archive templates to reflect a similar style.

Blogger

Blogger is a tricky one because there is no real way to massage the effects of the provided template tags. You don’t have the options of plugins or hacking at code to achieve the desired results. Therefore, the following solution provides similar results to the above but still places the blog title in your title tags.

<MainPage>
   <title><$BlogDescription$></title>
</MainPage>
<ItemPage>
   <title><$BlogPageTitle$> &raquo; <$BlogDescription$></title>
</ItemPage>

Each blog platform provides a mean to massage your output so it displays in a way that meets your needs. As a Problogger, I encourage you to consider using one of these methods (or roll your own!) to tweak your title tag and get the most bang for your buck.