SEO Business Blogging

All good fairy tales begin with the words, “Once upon a time…” In this fantasy-meets-reality tale, Patricia Fusco weaves a story about SEO from the perspective of Harry Potter. This is a high-level, historical overview of SEO that brings us up to the present. Whether you’re an SEO wizard or not, this article helps bring us to a new understanding of SEO by relating it to a part of “pop culture.”

To read, “If Harry Potter Did SEO,” click here.

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Chris writes that, “Google Maps team announced support of the hCard microformat today in map search results.” How will microformats benefit local search? Find out in this interesting article posted on the Natural Search Blog. You can read the full article here.

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Note: SEO Title Tag 2.3.0 adds compatibility with WordPress 2.6!

*** With SEO Title Tag version 2.3.0 we have dropped support of versions of WordPress prior to 2.3 if you are still using an older version of WordPress you should be able to continue using legacy version 2.2.1.

Title tags are arguably the most important of the on-page factors for search engine optimization (”SEO”). It blows my mind how post titles are also used as title tags by WordPress, considering that post titles should be catchy, pithy, and short-and-sweet; whereas title tags should incorporate synonyms and alternate phrases to capture additional search visibility.

Now, thankfully, there is a solution, allowing you to decouple post titles from title tags. Introducing… the SEO Title Tag 2.3.0 WordPress plugin.

SEO Title Tag makes is dead-easy to optimize the title tags across your WordPress-powered blog or website. Not just your posts, not just your home page, but any and every title tag on your site! If this plugin, along with a few hours of keyword research and copywriting of optimized titles, doesn’t make a significant impact on your search traffic, you’re doing something wrong!

SEO Title Tag is authored by SEO specialist web agency Netconcepts. Version 1.0 was by Netconcepts’ president Stephan Spencer. Version 2.0 was a collaborative effort — Stephan did the concept development and Netconcepts’ code jockeys Oliver Kastler, Mike Harding and Elton Fry did all the heavy lifting. Since version 2.1 Andrew Shell has taken over development responsibilities. It is completely free and has been released as “open source” under the GPL license. So enjoy!

Features include:

• Allows you to override a page’s or a post’s title tag with a custom one.
• New for v2.0 A Title Tag input box in the Edit Post and Write Post forms. (Previously in version 1.0 you had to use the Custom Field box.)
• New for v2.0 Mass editing of title tags for all posts, static pages, category pages, tag pages, tag conjunction pages, archive by month pages, — indeed, any URL — all in one go.
• Define a custom title tag for your home page (or, more accurately, your Posts page, if you have chosen a static Front Page set under Options -> Reading), through the Options -> SEO Title Tag page in the WordPress admin.
• New for v2.0 Define the title tag of 404 error pages, also through Options -> SEO Title Tag.
• New for v2.0 Handles internal search result pages too.
• New for v2.0 Title tags of category pages can optionally be set to the category description. If you use a Meta Tag plugin like Add Meta Tags, then you should not use this feature and instead let the Meta Tag plugin use the category description for the meta description on category pages.
• If you choose to keep the blog name in your title tags (not recommended!), the order of the blog name and the title are automatically reversed, giving more keyword prominence to the title instead of the blog name. Note there is also an option to replace your blog name with a shorter blog nickname.

And best of all, the plugin is FREE!

Suitably convinced? Then Download the plugin!

NEW: Rate this plugin at WordPress.org

Screenshots

Installation instructions

1. (If upgrading from a prior version of SEO Title Tag, be sure to deactivate the old version beforehand.)
2. Upload the seo-title-tag directory and the files within it to your wp-content/plugins directory.
3. Activate the plugin.
4. Under Presentation -> Theme Editor in the WordPress admin, select “Header” from the list and replace:

   <title><?php bloginfo('name'); wp_title(); ?></title>

   (or whatever you have in your <title> container with:

   <title><?php if (function_exists('seo_title_tag')) { seo_title_tag(); } else { bloginfo('name'); wp_title();} ?></title>

5. Configure the settings under Options -> SEO Title Tag. You’ll want specify a title tag for your home page which will override your blog name as the home page’s title tag, specify a title tag for 404 error pages. You can also configure here whether you want all the rest of your site’s title tags to have your blog name, or a shortened version of your blog name, or neither, appended to the end. IMPORTANT: You must save the settings, even if you haven’t changed them from their defaults, in order to ensure that the title tags for Posts and for Pages works properly.
6. For those of you with a static Front Page chosen under Options -> Reading, the “home page” described in the point above is actually the Posts page, and as such, the SEO Title Tag options page will actually will say “Posts Page” instead of “Home Page” — because it detects that you have selected a static Front Page. In such a scenario, in order to also customize the Front Page’s title tag, specify a Title Tag on that page’s Edit Page form, or within Manage -> Title Tags -> Pages.
7. Define custom title tags for your existing posts, static pages, category pages and tag pages in the admin under Manage -> Title Tags.
8. When writing a new post/page, define a title tag by typing something into the “Title Tag (optional)” field. If you’re happy to use the post title as the title tag, then you can leave it blank.
9. Note: If upgrading to WordPress 2.3 from a prior version where you used the SEO-Title-Tag plugin with Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW) in order to migrate your old tag page titles you need to first import your UTW tags into the new native tagging structure. You can do this in your WordPress admin by clicking on Manage > Import > Ultimate Tag Warrior. Once you have these imported just deactivate and reactivate SEO-Title-Tags and your old title tags will be able to be used.

To learn more about search engine optimizing your WordPress blog, you’ll probably want to read Stephan Spencer’s 10 tip series on Blog SEO.

To-do

• support mass editing of meta descriptions?
• import titles by uploading a file in CSV format
• possibly rename custom option fields and table name
• add some more text to the titles of tag pages globally. They are using the same divider as used for posts, and really there should be an option to add something like “Tag | Posts Related to Tag | Blog Name”
• create all needed values on activation so that you no longer have to save the settings in the SEO Title Tag Options before the plugin will work properly

Feedback?

Got a bug to report? Or an enhancement to recommend? Or perhaps even some code to submit for inclusion in the next release? Great! Share your feedback with the author, Stephan Spencer, either below or on his blog at this post.

UPDATE: 2.0beta2 has some important bug fixes, including the issue where Options weren’t updating and the Manage > subtab wasn’t displaying.

UPDATE: 2.0beta3 has more important bug fixes, including the issue where MySQL tables were sometimes not being created, and PHP tags weren’t all consistently starting with <?php but instead the <? shorthand which doesn’t work on some server configurations.

UPDATE: 2.0beta5 has more fixes for MySQL issues some folks were having. Also fixed a IIS server incompatibility issue.

UPDATE: 2.0beta6 fixes a problem where some folks were seeing a “No Posts Found” message under Manage -> Title Tags -> Posts even though the blog has posts. And it fixes a problem for users of WordPress version 2.0.5 and earlier, where titles on category pages weren’t showing up due to an undefined function attribute_escape (a new function introduced in WordPress 2.0.6).

UPDATE: 2.0beta7 fixes a problem with the page number sometimes appearing on static pages and a problem with a MySQL error on the Manage > Title Tags > Posts page.

UPDATE: 2.0RC1 fixes categories showing a warning if there are no category title tags set; Manage Posts filtering out everything thats not a post (images, pages). Also added and tested fix for menu links (”edit.php”).

UPDATE: 2.0RC2 fixes a problem with backslashes appearing before apostrophes.

UPDATE: 2.1.0 adds WordPress 2.3 compatibility.

UPDATE: 2.1.1 fixes bug where old title tags for UTW tag pages weren’t being imported. Also fixes WordPress 2.3 bug of not displaying page titles for tag intersections and unions correctly.

UPDATE: 2.1.2 fixes display issues with international characters.

UPDATE: 2.1.3 fixes issue with extra slashes being added. Also adds Nonce support for extra security.

UPDATE: 2.3.0 updates the layout to display better in the new WordPress admin.

UPDATE: 2.3.1 fixed an issue where in WordPress 2.6.1 saving a post/page creates multiple title_tag custom fields.

UPDATE: 2.3.2 fixed an issue where if you were using nested pages (the parent functionality) fields might not show up on the mass edit screen.

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About the Author

This plugin was developed by Netconcepts, a web agency specializing in SEO, ecommerce, and blog marketing. Friends of Netconcepts include Honeybell Fruit Baskets, Skechers, Allen Edmonds, Thompson Cigar, Cheap Tickets, Lighting Catalog, eFaucets, Ralph Lauren, Guitar Trader: Guitars & Basses, Hello Direct, Bellacor, PSSL DJ Equipment & Stage Lighting, Northern Tool + Equipment, Sur La Table, Abbey Press, Toolfetch, Cabela’s, Women’s Fashions from Nordstrom, Invitations by Dawn, Wallpaper from American Blinds, Metro Style, Brylane Home, Woman Within Plus Size Clothing, and Expedia Australia. Netconcepts was founded in 1995 by Stephan Spencer and is based in Madison, Wisconsin with a production office in Auckland, New Zealand.

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Optimizing a website that has tens of thousands—or even hundreds of thousands—of dynamically generated pages, requires thinking differently. Old school SEO, where you assign each page a keyword theme based on keyword research and hand-craft a title tag, H1 tag and intro copy, then figure out the best internal links to send to the page, just doesn’t scale with big sites. Particularly when you’re talking about the magnitude that our Netconcepts clients are operating at—typically over 10,000 SKUs and over 100,000 indexed pages.

It’s essential that you focus your SEO efforts in such a way that the effects will cascade through your site.

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“The Dallas Kwik-E-Mart is one of the eleven created nationwide out of 7-Eleven stores, and it’s a simply fantastic piece of viral marketing, participatory marketing – and yes, linkbait,” writes Chris Smith in this article on the Natural Search Blog. Viral marketing and link bait are today’s buzzwords in search, and what better way to glean ideas for your business than to see a successful campaign in action? Find out what happens when TV-meets-reality in this interesting experiment, and what it could mean for you. You can read the article here.

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“Google’s recent deployment of Universal Search resulted in the inclusion of content drawn in from their other search verticals into the main web search results. As this integration trend continues, and as Google further expands upon the 200+ signals they use for ranking, it becomes increasingly important to diversify a site’s presence on the web, and to work on ranking well in each of the various areas of vertical search,” writes Chris Smith in his “Locals Only” column.

To learn more about how you should integrate images into your Local Search, read the full article.

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In this article from ClickZ, P.J. Fusco comments on the words “Personalized Search” and how they relate to “Universal Search.” P.J. writes a powerful message by saying, “With an ever-evolving pattern of relevant search results, the long-standing futurist mantra has changed. It’s no longer enough to think locally and act globally.” Find out more about how you can stay on top of personalized search for your company. Click here to read the article.

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Michael Fitzgerald focuses on the popularity of Steve Spangler’s blog in this article written for Inc.com. Learn more about how Steve Spangler turned boring content and bad publicity into an overnight “organic” success with the advice of Stephan Spencer, Founder and President of Netconcepts.

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Last month Stephan Spencer, Founder and President of NetConcepts, spoke at the “Give It Up” panel at SMX Advanced, where panelists shared some of their best-kept secrets. For those of you who didn’t attend, there was a 30 day moratorium on blogging/writing about the session. Today marks the end of that embargo period, so be sure to read Stephan’s article and get an inside look on how to deconstruct grouped Google results.

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