In my previous post on Wordpress SEO, I looked at how you can switch the relative importance in Google’s eyes of your blog name and description. In this post I’ll look at how we can change our page titles to make them more SEO friendly without messing up our website navigation.
One of my (very few) frustrations with the Wordpress functionality is the page naming convention, and specifically that the page title HAS to form the navigation link in your main or sub-navigation. It’s frustrating because I know the importance of writing a strong page name in <h1> tags when creating a search optimised page.
Lets say I want to create a page which is optimised for the search term “website design costs France” (I probably will in future!). In an ideal world, I want to have that exact search phrase as my page title, but in my nav, I probably just want it to show as ‘Design Costs’ (ie much smaller and not hogging the whole of my navigation). Out of the box, Wordpress doesn’t allow you to do this, but there IS a way around the problem and that is:
Remove the function which automatically inserts the page title in page.php and instead add the title manually in the content box, giving the title the required <h1> tags via the Wordpress wysiwyg editor.
To do this via your admin panel, navigate to Appearance / Editor (wp-admin/theme-editor.php) and open your Page Template ( page.php) file for editing and delete the line just after:
<div class=”post” id=”post-<?php the_ID(); ?>”>
The bit to delete in my theme looks like this:
<h2 class=”storytitle”><a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” rel=”bookmark”><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
but it may look slightly different in yours depending on what theme you’re using. Make sure you save the bit you’ve deleted so you can go back and add it in if for some reason it’s not working for you.
If you now visit one of the pages on your live website, you’ll find that the page no longer has a title (so you’ll need to go back through all your pages and manually add in new titles).
So lets do one: open one of your existing website pages for editing, and leaving the post title as it is in the first box, write a new title in the top of the page content box, then highlight it, then select Heading 1 from the formatting drop down box to assign the <h1> tag to your page title (you may need to click on the ’show kitchen sink icon to see the drop down box as per the image below).
Now click on Update Page, and go and have a look at your new title on the live page. You may find you need to change the <h1> style attributes in your style.css file to make the titles display just as you want them (they sometimes have too much padding-top by default for correct alignment at the top of the page), all of which can be done from the theme editor page.
That’s it, you’re now ready to take command of your page titles without the need for lengthy navigation links.
Go on... click it... you know you want to!
4 Comments
A fantastic read….very literate and informative. Many thanks….what theme is this you are using and also, where is your RSS button ?
Thanks for the feedback. The theme is Aeros (customised to randomise the background image), there’s a link in the footer of the site. RSS button is at the top of the page on the RHS!
Thanks so much for this – I had just about given up trying to find this info!
Thanks , that’s really a huge help .
I haven’t find myself the way opt my blog title and post title until come to this article .
Thanks Dave .