Lorna Li | Green Marketing 2.0

I am just getting through a round of SEO enhancements on 2 blogs. I am currently in the midst of testing my new plugins and trying to get them all to work. With the help of Ross Chapman, my eco-conscious WordPress and Joomla! developer, we identified several free WordPress plugins that enable search engine optimization, social bookmarking and RSS distribution.

Unlike the Joomla! Extensions Directory, WordPress plugins are randomly distributed throughout the Web. While the official WordPress site claims that now there is a central place to download all WordPress plugins, I assure you, there’s more out there in cyberspace, some better than what you would find in the WordPress Plugin Database.

I evaluated, installed and uninstalled several SEO plugins, most of which focused on meta data and were extremely limited from a true SEO standpoint. What I was most interested in was a plugin that enabled completely customizable title tags for blog posts.

The Importance of Title Tags for SEO

Title tags are the most important of the on-page factors for search engine optimization. According to SEO expert Craig Hordlow of Red Bricks Media, an SF-based search marketing agency, 90% of search engine relevance comes from the title tags.

Title tags that are keyword rich, customized descriptions of your page content are excellent spider food. Unfortunately, in Word Press, and in many other content management systems, post titles are often default title tags, which eliminates your ability to incorporate synonyms and alternate phrases that can capture additional search visibility.

An extremely annoying thing about WordPress is that it will place your blog name at the beginning of your title tag, which gives higher search relevance to your blog name than keywords in your post title. What’s even more heinous is seeing “blog archive” smack dab in between your blog title and post title. Who the hell thought THIS was a good idea?

SEO Title Tag 2.0 beta 7

Of all the SEO plugins I reviewed, the only one that offered truly customizable title tags is SEO Title Tag 2.0 beta 7 is a free Word Press plugin written by SEO experts for WordPress. SEO Title Tag is a fantastic plugin authored by SEO specialist web agency Netconcepts. It allows you to:

• Override a page’s default title tag with a custom tag
• Allows mass editing of title tags for all posts, static pages, category pages, tag pages - in fact any url, at once
• Reverses the order of your blog name and title, giving more keyword prominence to your title, rather than the blog name
• And more!

The best thing about this plugin is that it’s FREE! Thanks Stephan!

Download SEO Title Tag 2.0.

Now only if I can get it to work…

Technorati Tags: SEO Title Tag 2.0, SEO, WordPress plugins, search marketing, Stephan Spencer, Netconcepts, search engine optimization, lorna li

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 1st, 2007 at 6:27 pm and is filed under Blogging & Micro-Blogging, SEO, Search Engine Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.