In this post I'll show how to create search engine friendly title tags and meta tags for your Wordpress blog.

Title Tag
It is generally accepted that the title tag is one of the most important aspects of search engine optimization (SEO). The title tag determines the text that appears in the topmost bar of the web browser, and also tells the search engines and the surfers what the web page is all about. Therefore, the title tag should contain a catchy keyphrase with the most important keywords stuffed in, and also preferrably the main blog title.

Enter the wonderful Wordpress plugin calledOptimal Title. This plugin will automatically produce title tags that contain, first, the title of the current post or category, and, second, the blog title. If, like me, you are using the Ads Minded Wordpress Theme, you already have the plugin installed. If you have not activated the plugin yet and don't know how to do it, see a previous post of mine for detailed instructions. If you haven't got this plugin yet, just visit the Optimal Title home page, download and install the plugin as instructed. Then activate it from the Wordpress Dashboard –> Plugins.

Note that the Optimal Title usage instructions may not be correct for you. If you are using a theme that has a separate header.php file, you should add the piece of code in the header, not the index.php. For instance, in the Ads Minded theme, go to the Theme Editor, choose header.php for editing, and near the beginning of the file, find the line that says

..and right after that, copy and paste the following line:

Update the file. That's it - now you have search engine -and user- friendly title tags. Of course, first you'll need to dream up a catchy and keyword-rich main title for your blog. Once you've got it, go to the Wordpress dashboard –> options and type your ingenious title in the Weblog title field.

META tags
I noticed that my blog was described in the SERPs (search engine results pages) as "One Wordpress Blog". I dug deeper into the matter and found out I had neglected to create search engine friendly meta tags and was using the default Wordpress meta tag instead. As I looked for the easiest way to correct the problem, I found several plugins that create automatical meta tags. However, none of the plugins that I found did the job quite right. So, I'm still looking for a functional plugin that would automatically create search engine friendly meta tags for the main index, category archives and single posts.

Meanwhile, here's a work-around that seems to work quite well. This trick utilizes the Optimal Title plugin and some php inside the meta tags to automatically produce search engine friendly and appropriate meta tags for each single post, category archive and main page.
If you want to do the same, just add the following lines in your header.php using the Wordpress Theme Editor:

This will create META tags with the following content:

Home page -> Meta tag: Blog title
Category archive page -> Meta tag: Category - Blog title
Single post -> Meta tag: Post title - Blog title

The drawback of this method is that the meta tags will all be identical. However, since the search engines do not use the meta tags for ranking pages in the SERPs anymore, this should suffice.