Welcome back for Part 2 of this Comprehensive Guide to WordPress SEO, yesterday I covered the importance of permalink structure. Today I’ll be going over the importance of Dynamic Title tags as well as your common header tags.
Title Tags:
Title tags go inside your html -> head statement, and are generally used by indexes and search engines to display a clickable link on the search engine results page (SERP). So with that knowledge my basic recommendation for the title tag in your standard header.php file is the following:
<title> Key Description | Website Name </title>
If I show up in the top 10 searches for SEO(never going to happen), from a standard user’s perspective “Top 10 Ways to Get into the Top 10 Results for Google | Bloggercamp” looks much more enticing (read clickable) than the reverse. There is one caveat on this, if you have or ARE an established brand, ALWAYS put your brandname first.
There are a few standard suggestions for dynamic title tags (single page, single post, categories, etc) in the header.php and most involve either knowing a little bit of code, OR, you could just use uberdose’s All in One SEO Pack which pretty much saves the day when creating dynamic titles for each individual post/page/index.
I can’t stress enough how great All in One SEO Pack is as a tool. Get it, swear by it. It’ll save you time and headaches. Aside from Akismet, this should be the first plugin you activate.
Header Tags:
Header tags are used ideally as physical importance flags, not presentation. Search engines typically look at a myriad of things on the source of a webpage and as it stands, the text between header tags should be treated much the same as anchor text(links).
Headers are useful for Keywords, Long Tail Keywords, and subsections of an article. Think of headers as sign posts for search engines “hey this might be important”.
Now that we know the use of headers, how to we apply to correct order of headers? Some of you already know that there is H1 through H6; although H4-H6 are seldom used.
- H1’s should be for Sitenames, description…
- H2’s should be for Article or Page Titles
- H3’s should be for Important sections of an article or Sidebar Headings (section headings)
- H4’s and beyond to display hierarchy of importance in subsections only, category names is acceptable as well.
<h1> through <h6>
Next time I’ll be covering the important <meta> tags that go inside the <head> tags at the top of your headers.
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on Jan 4th, 2008 at 8:20 am
I always suggest removing that “Blog Archive” bit from the title tag if your theme uses it. With the short amount of space displayed as a page title in most search engines, it’s just wasting space. That and it appears to throw off Google adsense when it’s in there. (ie “Oh, blog is part of the title. I’ll serve adverts concerning blogs.”)
on Jan 4th, 2008 at 8:25 am
@drmike,
Very true, thanks for the addition.