A few months ago I updated my theme for Jay Geiger.com. I didn’t realize at the point that it had screwy title, keyword and description tags. That definitely doesn’t help you rank in the search engines. Here are my top tips for SEOing you theme wether you bought it or built it yourself.
1. TITLE TAG – The title is the most important thing other than links and content is the title tag. For the most part, search engines will see each page with different title as a different page. Open up your “header.php” that correlates to your theme. This file should be in a subdirectory under ‘…\wp-content\themes\…’.
SIDENOTE: If you are using Windows/IIS as your web server you may need to open the file in wordpad, not notepad.
Look for the line(s) that begin with “<title>”. It should look exactly or somewhat like this.
<title><?php wp_title(‘ ‘); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { echo “-”; } ?> <?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?></title>
Note that it is “wp_title(‘ ‘)” not “wp_title()’. If you use the second one you get a weird raquo character in your title like “»”. I don’t like that little raquo element.
So basically my title will be my blog’s name for the main page. For all other page it will be <POST NAME> – <BLOG NAME>. You always want your keywords first as you want to rank higher for whatever your post is all about.
2. DESCRIPTION TAG – Search engines generally show the page’s description as the description for search page results. You want to make sure this is unique. Ideally you would want to put a unique description for each post in here. I don’t think that is really that easy in WordPress. Here is the next best thing.
<meta name=”description” content=”<?php wp_title(‘ ‘); ?> by Geiger” />
This basically puts the post title followed with ” by Geiger”. Don’t use my name! use yours. Feel free to add a little more text to this but keep in mind that you will want your title here. You could put part of your post’s text as well but I just left it simpler.
3. KEYWORDS TAG – Some people don’t care about the keywords meta tag. I think that it helps, just not as much as it used to. As WordPress transitions more from categories to tags, this could be more useful. It would be ideal to put your post’s title followed by your tags in here. For now though I am just going to put in my title.
<meta name=”keywords” content=”<?php wp_title(‘ ‘); ?>, Geiger” />
I also added the keyword “Geiger” as I want to be the number one Geiger in the world! Feel free to add some generic keywords that apply to your entire blog.
