When Google Changes Page Titles
As most webmasters are aware, the text put within a page’s <TITLE> tags appears in two places - at the top of the browser window when a user is viewing a page, and it appears as the link anchor text on Google’s and other search engine results pages. But there are some rare occasions when Google will display different link text on their result pages than what is used in the <TITLE> text. So, why is this happening, and could it be happening to you?
I was recently researching some problems that a client was exeriencing due to bad advice given to him by a prior SEO agency (they’d encouraged him to buy links and participate in link exchanges, I found, among other sins). While looking into the site’s problems which included various over-optimizations and bad usability design, I discovered that when I used a particular keyword to search in Google, his site’s homepage came up with a completely different title in the search results. Most of his other desired keywords brought up his HTML <TITLE> text like normal, but this one did not…
Popularity: 8% [?]
Possible Related Posts
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 06/12/2007 | Permalink | 
Email
| 
Print
Trackback | Comments (8) | Comments RSS |
Filed under: Content Optimization, Google, HTML Optimization, SEO, Search Engine OptimizationDMOZ, Google, html-title, html-title-tag, Open-Directory-Project, page-titles, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, SERP-display
New WordPress Plugin for SEO
I’ve just released “SEO Title Tag”, a plugin for WordPress. As the name implies, it allows you to optimize your WordPress site’s title tags in ways not supported by the default WordPress installation. For example:
- If you define a custom field (called “title_tag”) when writing or editing a post (or static page), that custom field will then be displayed as the title tag.
- The post title and blog name are reversed for better keyword prominence within the title tag.
- You can shorten or eliminate the blog name altogether from your title tags.
- You can define a custom title tag for your home page through the Options page.
- It will use the category’s description as the title on category pages (when defined).
- If you’re using the UltimateTagWarrior plugin, it will put the tag name in the titles on tag pages.
- It will also cook you dinner and all sorts of other amazing, useful stuff (not really).
Get the plugin now: SEO Title Tag WordPress Plugin
I’d love your feedback, as this is my first WordPress plugin.
Enjoy!
Popularity: 12% [?]
Possible Related Posts
Posted by Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts on 07/14/2006 | Permalink | Email
| Print
Trackback | Comments (5) | Comments RSS |
Filed under: HTML Optimization, ToolsBlog Optimization, blogging, page-titles, plugin, plugins, SEO, title-tags, WordPress
