The Tlog - a technology blog

Which of the following titles (let’s say, as a result of a Google search, or in some list) is more appealing, to someone interested in WordPress 2.0:

The Tlog - a technology blog » What’s new in WordPress 2.0?

or:

What’s new in WordPress 2.0? » The Tlog - a technology blog

I believe anyone would prefer the second choice. Right? However, WordPress creates titles in the first format, by default. And, until a few hours ago, that’s what the titles in my blogs looked like.

Yet, making the post’s title appear before the blog’s name is much better - both for SEO (search engines, apparently, prioritize the beginning of the title) and, perhaps even more importantly, for making people actually click on any links in search engine results.

Or del.icio.us bookmarks. Although you can manually change the bookmark’s name, by default - which is what most people pick - it uses the <title> tag, and making it begin with the blog’s name, in a way, “hides” the post’s name - which is what people may be interested in.

Not to mention that, often, long titles are truncated, so people will only see the part of the title - the beginning. That part had better be what that particular page is about.

Nobody ever searches for a “technology blog” (or a gaming blog, or a political blog, or…). People search for (samples taken from this blog’s December stats) “bloglines alternatives“, or “google earth squid“, or “nintendo revolution“, or “communist game“. And they may click on a link that’s labeled as something like that - not on one that says “The Tlog - a technology blog - (more text that nobody reads, because they’ve already skipped to the next link)”.

Now, how to make WordPress create “proper” <title>s? You can edit the theme files to change it, but it would put the separator in the wrong place. You can, then, give a parameter to the title to make it not show a separator, then insert it manually. Doable… but too much for something that should be really, really simple, right?

Somebody apparently thought so as well, and created a WordPress plugin called Optimal Title. You still need to edit a file, but it’s much easier, because you can simply replace wp_title() with… well, just read that page. It’s 20-30 seconds of work, trust me.

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