Many of you know I’m a big fan of WordPress, and many of you are using or are considering using WordPress as part of your university web presence. In this post we continue a short series on search engine optimization tips for WordPress blogs. These may have been covered elsewhere in your travels (some of them, in one form or another, on this blog), but this one and the next seem rather obscure and worth repeating. I’ve had success with these on a variety of WP installations.

Herewith, tip #2 in the series on optimizing your WordPress blog for search engines. Note that these tips are not necessarily options on Wordpress.com hosted blogs.

Tip 2 - Optimal Title

Optimal Title is a WP plugin that places your blog post title first in the HTML title (the thing that appears in your web browser’s top-most bar), followed by the blog name. The default WP setting is to place the blog title first. In some cases, this helps search engines distinguish among pages on your website, which can lead to your site being better represented in search engines and reduce the number of posts that are treated as “duplicate” or “similar” content. You’ve worked hard on those posts, now get the credit you deserve!

Here’s the difference:

Before plugin:

Peterson’s - a Nelnet Company- Syndication for Higher Ed >> Babson RSS feed image - Update!

After plugin:

Babson RSS feed image - Update! >> Peterson’s - a Nelnet Company - Syndication for Higher Ed