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Minor Blog Improvements

Following are couple of improvements to my current blog:

  1. Changed the title of my WordPress Blogpost pages.

    By default, WordPress gives following title to the entry:
    [Blog Title] - [Post Title]

    This title is ok but it’s really not good for search engine result pages, if you have long blog title. For example, search for ‘Starting a MicroISV’ and you will find Ian’s blog post on the topic as first hit. Do you see how the blog title and words ‘blog archive’ are taking all the space. Comapre this to the search ‘Rediff Customer Service’, where my blog post is first in search results. See how the title of Blog is at the end rather than at beginning. I think this is a much better idea. How to get it? Unfortunately, you will have to modify the index.php file of your WP installation. Open index.php in text editor. Replace <title>Current code</title> with

    <title>< ?php wp_title(''); ?>< ?php if(isset($_GET['p']) or isset($_GET['cat'])) {echo ‘ [';} bloginfo('name'); if(isset($_GET['p']) or isset($_GET['cat']) ){ echo ‘]’; }?></></></title>

    After couple of weeks, Google Search Results pages should show these better titles!

  2. Subscribe to Comments enabled by default.

    3. I have observed that most of the time when I comment on another blog, I am interested in follow up comments by author of blog post and/or others. Reason being that if I care enough to comment, I care about follow up comments as well. Assuming that my blog post readers might want the same, by default ‘Subscribe To Comments’ checkbox is selected. What do you think?

  3. I made the comment field bit bigger in height.
  4. I made the the blog, 508 accessible. There were very minor changes I needed to do to pass the automated 508 accessibility test.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 15th, 2005 at 5:16 pm and is filed under Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

4 Responses to “Minor Blog Improvements”

  1. Ian Says:
    June 15th, 2005 at 5:47 pm

    Thanks for making me the example :-)
    I’ve thought about adjusting the format of the titles myself. I have this sneaky suspicion though that Google is weighing the words at the back of titles more than the front. I have no proof of this but it’s just a bit of a hunch. Perhaps this is because spammers have figured out that the title is important and are shoving words to the front of the title. Not sure.

    This will actually be a good test so make sure you follow up in a few months with how this worked. If you got more click through and ranked higher in results. It might be a good idea to note your current Google position on a few of your popular older posts and see where they are a few months after the change.

  2. JD Says:
    June 15th, 2005 at 6:39 pm

    Ian,

    Whether it helps rank or not, at least if my page is listed in search results, I would like to show some meaningful title instead of a title which begins with ‘Notes from Desi Geek.’ And I made this change at least few months back, I am just late to blog about it! :)
    JD

  3. Arjun Says:
    June 16th, 2005 at 12:03 am

    Regarding #1, i use the Optimal Title Wp plugin. (http://elasticdog.com/2004/09/optimal-title/)

    Also, would suggest the use of permalinks… to improve search engine results.

  4. Ritesh Jariwala Says:
    June 16th, 2005 at 12:30 am

    Hi JD,

    Good Tips. Google do searches more on title, if your page title is describe your post correctly, you are getting top on search.

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