ComTech News

I have always been annoyed by the fact that the titles of word press blogs always seem to end up “Blog Title - Post Title”. (in other words this post would appear in search engines and blog services listed as, “Comtech News - Simple Word Press Modification”) Yes I was annoyed but not enough to bother looking at it.

Then the other day I was screwing around on Digg and found an artile on ten great word press plugins. One was called Optimal Title and it promised to fix my issue and make my titles read “Post Title - Blog Title”. So like a typical lazy blogger I downloaded it and started to read the installation instructions and when I did it became obvious that the plugin would work fine but was not needed, I felt like a dolt it was so simple to just modify the title code in the header. LIKE DUH!

To be fair to myself I don’t know php coding very well (read that I pay others to write any and all code for me and fear mucking around with it much). So I made a copy of the header text, which is always a good idea and tried the modifications and figured if I screwed it up I could just drop the orginal code back it.

If you are afraid to muck with your code like me, don’t worry this one is simple enough.

First, Go into your admin section and click on “presentation” then on “theme editor” and select “header.php” as your file to edit. Copy the entire text and paste it into a note pad file and SAVE IT so you have a back up incase you screw up something.

Second you will see something that looks like this a few lines down in the header.php file

Even if you almost never mess with code this is so simple you probally know what to do next, yep you got it just swap the two php include commands to look like this,

So now if you look at any individual post in our blog you will see at the top of your browser the title of the post comes first. In our case this theme also had a command that brought in the word archive for any post over a certain number of days old. I removed that command so now the titles are short and simple!

If you doubt your ability to make this modification give it a try trust me if you can install a Word Press blog and manage it you can handle this one. Also as long as you always make a back up of the file you can be sure you can fix any screw up and not loose your prior modifications.

So why do you want to do this anyway?

1. No matter what anyone tells you title tags DO still effect ranking. And the order of the words in the title tag also effect rankings. The effect is MINOR but with blogs you rank so many odd and “long tail terms” this little mod could easily bring you several thousand extra visits a year just from rank improvements. This is assuming your blog is active and has links, etc. It won’t fix a blog that sucks but it will make a decent one better.

2. Search Engines and Blog Syndication Services will often use that title tag when they display a link to your post. Also they often will cut the title at 6 words. So consider you are looking for ways to improve your iPod in a search and you see a result that says, “Comtech News, Great Way to Enhance” your odds of clicking that link are lower then Great Way to Enhance Your iPod - Comtech”. See the difference?

3. Blog feeds are used both for good and evil purposes. Such as someone may take your feed and add it to one of their pages because they value it or some spammer may scrape your feed and the feeds of others to create spam blogs (splogs) and there is little you can do to influence either. One way or another it is links for you in MOST situations. So you want those links to always get your best key words in them.

So give this simple modification a try if you are hosting your own Word Press Blog, heck it just looks better everywhere your posts show up and it will help your marketing results as well.  Anyone else know of a similar easy modification for a Word Press Blog?

Technorati Tags: word press, wordpress, blog, blogging, php, seo, sem, internet marketing, search engine optimization, blog optimization, blog modifications

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