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I’m a big fan of things you can do to your site in under three minutes that will have a dramatic effect on your search engine optimization (and ultimately how many visitors you get to your site).

This is a great little plugin called Optimal Title. (You can get it here).

The plugin changes the way your titles read at the top-left of your browser window. As you probably know, Google and other major search engines focus only on the first several words of your page title. So if your site-name is the first thing in your page title on every single page, you’re wasting precious space where you could be identifying the subject of your post.

Before:

The standard WordPress title format looks like this: Site Title | Subtitle >> Name of Post

Now if your subtitle is especially long, you’re really not leaving yourself much room for the title of your post (which is arguably the most important thing from the search-engine perspective).

After:

Once you’ve installed Optimal Title, the divider | will be moved to after the title, and the title of your article will be the first thing you see in the top left of your page. Now your site is optimized.

One quick note: Installation requires one (very easy) extra step after you’ve activated the plugin: You’ll have to open up your ‘header’ file (under Presentation / Theme Editor) and look for the line that contains your title information. Just look for the line that contains the text wp_title() and replace it with this:

<title><?php optimal_title(); ?> <?php bloginfo(’name’); ?></title>

Remember you’re replacing everything from the <title> tag to the </title> tag.

That’s it! 3 minutes to a better site with higher traffic.

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