Best Wordpress Title Code Right Here

Being the SEO freak that I am (and a reason why I hesitate using content management systems, because I lack complete control) I searched high and low for the best way to code my wordpress titles. The best thing I found was instructions to swap the tags in the title so they blog name 2nd and the page name was first. Then, your stuck with that >> thing... unless you use the optimal title plugin. Well, that sucks to (my apologies to the creator), because the page titles are still not optimized.

So I dug around the wordpress codex looking at the docs and I ran accross their wordpres conditional tags and put this together, which gives me exactly what I want.

<title><?php if(is_home()) : ?>11111111111111111111111<?php elseif(is_category()) : ?>2222222222222222222<?php wp_title(''); ?><?php elseif(is_single()) : ?><?php wp_title(''); ?><?php else : ?><?php wp_title(''); ?> - <?php bloginfo('name'); ?><?php endif; ?></title>

Code (markup):

Ok, what this will do is replace your homepage with whatever title you want, just replace the 1111111111's for that. Then, for the categories, replace the 2222222's with what you want to appear before the categories. Then, finally, whatever page isn't explicitly expressed how to title it, it will put "that page's name first - your site's title".

Look at the conditional tags page on wordpress for other conditionals, like for pages, archives, etc. For me this is as far as I had to go. You can see it in action at this Ford Mustang (still working on the wordpress design and seo) Wordpress powered site.

I'm really suprised nobody else hasn't done this yet (that I've found), since it was pretty easy to come up with.

 

I bet there was some plugin for improving titles, that ">> thing" 's boring indeed

 

Sweet code, and easy to impliment too.

Thanks!

 

I noticed you don't use meta keywords or description, how come?

 

Haven't gotten that far yet... just now started modding the default install.

 

ah, so the meta keywords and descritptions won't change for each post, just the title?

 

This is only for the title. You could use conditionals, tailored to your liking, for the description as well (or anything for that matter)...although you should probably look into finding a plugin for it first.

 

I added Meta tags to my WP blog yesterday and the only thing that I accomplished was loosing all my Adsense ads. I don’t know if it was coincidence but now I only have ads on a few of my pages, all the rest have my banners. If you take a look at this page you will see that adding Meta tags isn’t all its cracked up to be.