Review of WordPress (WP) Plugin – SEO Title Tag

Blog SEO Expert — Sat, 16 May 2009 03:59:22 +0000

Background – Keywords in page title tag

It is very important to have your keyword in the “title” tag of your pages. This is one element the search engine spiders pay most attention to in you blog post.

(Read all about this in “Keywords in the title tag – a must for good SEO“)

SEO Title Tag Plugin for WordPress (WP)

By default, WordPress has your post title as the meta title as well.

But most of the times, you would want to have the meta title different from the post title – for example, you may want to include variations of the keyword in the title.

The SEO Title Tag plugin for WP helps you do exactly that. Not just this, it even allows you to change the post slug (the URL of the blog post) so that you can include keywords in it!

Important Features of the “SEO Title Tag” plugin

You can define custom titles for:
- A post
- A page
- Categories
- Tags
- Any URL that you specify – like an author archive or a date based archive
You can set custom slugs for:
- A post
- A page
The plugin automatically puts your blog’s name at the end of the title (instead of the beginning), so that the most important keywords are visible first
You can specify the custom post title in the “New Post” or “Edit Post” admin pages
You can define custom title for 404 error pages as well
There is a facility for mass editing of titles and slugs

Screenshots

SEO Title Tag Plugin Screenshot

(Screenshots from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-title-tag/screenshots/ - please check it out for more screenshots)

Conclusion

The SEO Title Tag plugin for WordPress can really help boost your SEO efforts – use it!

Relevant Links

SEO Title Tag Plugin Homepage

SEO Title Tag Plugin Page on WordPress.org

Keywords in the title meta tag – a must for good SEO

Blog SEO Expert — Thu, 14 May 2009 02:37:11 +0000

It is important to have the right proportion of keywords in your post text, but there are many other places where the keywords should be present for a well optimized post.

One such place is the post’s Title meta tag.

What is the “title” meta tag?

A meta tag is an HTML element that is present in the section of your post’s HTML code.

(Although the title tag is not technically a meta tag – like the keywords meta tag and the description meta tag – it is a meta tag for all practical purposes since it appears in the head section along with the meta tags).

A meta tag contains information about a webpage, and as you would have guessed, the title meta tag has the information about the page’s title.

Basically, the title meta tag tells the search engine spiders what the title of the webpage is. This is the hyperlinked text that is displayed in search result pages (SERPs) of search engines like Google.

Difference between title meta tag and post title

Do not mistake the title meta tag with the post’s title – these are two different things (although they can be, and usually are, the same by default).

The title of the post is something that is visible as the post title to readers on your blog. On the other hand, the title meta tag is the text that is displayed in the title bar (the top blue bar of a window) of the browser.

Importance of having keywords in the “title” meta tag

So why is the title meta tag important? Because it is the element of a webpage that search engines pay the most attention to.

Yes, the title tag is the most important element of any webpage in terms of SEO – and therefore, it makes tremendous sense to have your keyword appear in it.

Also, since this is the hyperlinked text displayed to the users in search engine result pages (SERPs), it helps to have the keywords there – after all, it would be more tempting to the searchers to click the link and come to your blog if that link contains the keywords they are searching for.

How to put keywords in the title tag?

In most blogging software, by default, the title of your blog post becomes the title of the webpage as well. So, if you have your keywords in the title of your post, the title tag would automatically have the keywords.

However, there might be times when you would want to keep the post title different from the title tag. There are many tools and plugins available for this – more on it in another post!

(Update: Read a review of a great plugin for customizing title tags – “Review of WordPress (WP) Plugin – SEO Title Tag“)

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