Welcome to WebHelperMagazine.com. Please consider signing up for our RSS feed. Check out our job board, and be sure to leave comments -- we post your name and a link to your site as a way to thank you for joining the WHMag conversation.

Here’s another article in our SEO Matters series, where we examine the Title Tag and how it can take your site optimization to the max.

by Scott Frangos

What is a “Title Tag”, and why are they important?  Let’s find out, and learn how to write them better.  They’re an important part of the SEO puzzle.  Plus, for you WordPress Blog and Content Managers, I have a tip on how to automate some smart Title Tags using the excellent, fully-featured HeadSpace plugin for SEO.  And there’s a video, prepared by Gareth Davies of GSINC, that gives a nice overview with some SEO insights.

Summary from video (watch it below):

• Summarize what’s on your page using your Title Tag
• Title Tags appear in top bar of your browser
• A good CMS like WordPress allows you to edit Title Tags
• Keep your Titles to 63 Characters or less
• Write Unique Title Tags for every page
• Write your Title Tags with a particular, researched, SEO phrase

Here’s a link to the video, in case you need to review it at YouTube.

There you have it — a great little overview on Title Tags.  Now let’s take a look on an intermediate level BlogMaster technique to automatically create Title Tags in WordPress.

Title Tags on Auto-Pilot in your WordPress Websites…

I do a lot of “Max-SEO” configurations in my work at WebFadds.com, and I like to use the excellent WordPress plugin, HeadSpace, to make my SEO life easier, and one big advantage is having the program automatically generate custom Title and other tags from the copy for every article and page.

For example, below are global settings which would be applied to all pages and posts “unless otherwise specified:”

Since you don’t want the exact same title tag throughout your site, the next setting shows how every Post and Page is given a unique title, description and tags.  What you see in those fields now are variables the plugin author has set up to that when you enter %%title%%, for example, the HeadSpace plugin gets the specific title you write for a post and places it in the meta-title tag (so it is read by search engines and appears at the top of the browser).

There are a couple of other plugins for WordPress that provide similar help with SEO functions (”All in one SEO” is another), but I prefer HeadSpace because of its comprehensive approach.  When you use it, you will find lots of other ways to boost the performance of your site.  You can read a longer, two article series on using HeadSpace here.

Subscribe via RSS:
WordPress CMS Help

Join the Conversation

About the Author: Scott Frangos develops dynamic, automated WebSites at WebFadds.com, based on the WordPress platform. He is also a college instructor for CSS, XHTML and Photoshop courses and enjoys martial arts and digital photography. He lives with his wife, Pepper, and three dogs (Wisdom, Spirit and Steggman) in the Pacific Northwest.

About WebHelperMagazine: WebHelperMagazine is a digest of tutorials and helpful articles for WebMasters, BlogMasters & Social Marketers.

Tags | articles, bar, blog, blogged, blogging, blogmaster, BlogMasters, blogs, browser, cms, content, content managers, copy, customer, customers, developers, editing, frangos, global settings, headspace, illustrations, links, phrases, plugin, plugins, program, rss, s, search engines, seo, Series, site, sites, tags, Tips, title description, title tags, video, webmaster, website, websites, wordpress, writing