In previous articles, one of the quickest and easiest ways to prepare your website to be Search Engine Optimized (SEO’d) was by using a good Title for your page. In the article The Power of a Title (Tag) , you can see why the power of a title is so important. Titles are used throughout the site to pretty much summarize the content that will be displayed. In the article Where the Title is Seen , the many places that a title will show up is demonstrated from the browser itself to the names of the shortcuts and favourites. The article The Psychology of Page Titles explains how Titles are seen by Search Engines and people using Search Engines.

For WordPress users, the next step would be to Optimize the title on each page of a WordPress site. The Optimal Title plugin from ElasticDog helps make optimizing the title of a page much better by placing the name of the WordPress site at the end of the page title instead of in front like WordPress is set to do by default.

In The Psychology of Page Titles, you can see just how this would help. A normal WordPress installation would place the title of a page called "Dinty Moore Microwaveable Trays" after the title of the website. (Seen in Example 1 Below)

Example 1: Aleeya dotNet – Dinty Moore Microwaveable Trays

In the above example 1, "Aleeya dotNet" is the title of the WordPress website and "Dinty Moore Microwavable Trays" is the title of the page. By default, The browser title, favourite shortcut, desktop shortcut, and a search engine (Example 2 below) would display that page as "Aleeya dotNet – Dinty Moore Microwaveable Trays" .

Example 2:

Aleeya dotNet – Dinty Moore Microwaveable Trays
The meals are excellent. For a quick and easy meal at work, … You are
currently browsing an entry titled Dinty Moore Microwaveable Trays from the Aleeya …
www.aleeya.net/reviews/dinty-moore-microwaveable-trays/ – 35k – Oct 13, 2005 - Similar pages

ElasticDog’s WordPress Plugin Optimal Title would change that to read (See Example 3 below)

Example 3: Aleeya dotNet – Dinty Moore Microwaveable Trays

The Psychology of Page Titles discusses why this would be a better choice for having a page title. Not only will a search engine see the more important words of the title – Dinty Moore Microwavable Trays first, but the reader would be more apt to follow the link from a search engine result where the Keywords he or she is looking for would be displayed on the left (See Example 4 below)

Example 4:

Aleeya dotNet – Dinty Moore Microwaveable Trays
The meals are excellent. For a quick and easy meal at work, … You are
currently browsing an entry titled Dinty Moore Microwaveable Trays from the Aleeya …
www.aleeya.net/reviews/dinty-moore-microwaveable-trays/- 35k – Oct 13, 2005 - Similar pages

Other places this will be seen optimized will be in the Desktop shortcut if the reader makes a shortcut in Internet Explorer to this page (See Example 5 below)

Example 5:

On the page title itself (See Example 6 below)

Example 6:

And the page title will show the better title in the bookmark (Favourites) itself: (See Example 7 Below)

Example 7:

The Optimal Title plugin from ElasticDog is defiantly a WordPress Plugin I would categorize as one I cannot live without. Not only does it help facilitate how titles are displayed for readers, but it does dramatically improve the chances of readers finding the pages better in search engine results as well as optimization for Search Engines.

For the code on my own site, I have added this to the header to get it to display as it does:

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

The ‘at’ is actually replacing the default separator of ‘>>’ between the Page Title and the Blog name.