The Tlog - a technology blog

If you’ve read the Blogging Tips series, you’re surely aware of a part of it called The Importance of Titles. Titles (meaning what ends up between the <title> </title> tags) are one of the most important, and most ignored, parts of SEO, these days. Not only do search engines use them to rank pages, but they’re also what actually appears in search results, and a bad title is much less likely to be clicked on… even if the content is exactly what the user wants.

In case of blogs, the blogging software, typically, inserts the blog’s name and post title automatically, which is a start. But can it be improved? That’s what I wanted (and still want) to investigate.

By default, WordPress uses the common Blog title - Post title format. Which, as any “serious” blogger should know, is a pretty bad idea. People are interested in the post, not in the blog, at least at first. The blog’s name will be the same for every single one of your posts, and if it appears first, people will probably ignore that entry in the search results.

Again, nobody searches for blogs. They search for posts.

Which, of course, suggests that reversing the order is a good idea… and it certainly is. Themes like K2 do it automatically (though that one inserts an “at” between post title and blog name, which I don’t like — though it’s easy to change, of course), and there are also plugins like Optimal Title to do it.

But is this the best we can do? It’s what I’ve been doing until now, but… can we go a little further? What about removing the blog’s name from individual posts (not from the front page, of course)?

Not only should this be better in terms of SEO, but it should make search results more appealing. After all, hopefully, the post’s title should be — and be just — what the user is looking for.

I’m trying it now on Way of the Mind, where I seem to be doing most of my experiments these days. Of course, it will take a few weeks for Google and others to re-index every page and show them with the reduced title, but hopefully the results will be good.

I’m pretty optimistic about this one, so it will probably happen to my other blogs soon.