Every page of your site has a title tag that is an important part of search engine optimization. Your home page title is by default a combination of your Site, Title and Tagline from the “Settings” > “General” area within WordPress, and appears in the top of your browser window like below:
Site title and tagline (description) from “Settings” > “General”
Display at top of browser window or tab with a “>>” divider
This information will also display on relevant search engine results. Below you can see the site title and tagline displayed from our website when you search for “ProPhoto”.
Title = ProPhoto Blogs, Tagline = Blog, site, and portfolio in one
You may not want every page or post of your site to display the same title information, so you can specify different patterns for your page titles in “ProPhoto > Settings > Advanced > SEO”. Adding plain text to any of the fields in this area will print that text to the title of that page.
For example, if you entered just the text Bob Bobson – Awesome Photog into the “single posts” field here:
…every single post page type would have the title tag Bob Bobson – Awesome Photog as you see here:
There are also several special tags that start and end with “%” that can pull specific info from your page into the title. The default pattern“%post_title% » %blog_name%” in the “single posts” field would combine your text from your post title followed by the » double-chevron character, then the site title text (found in “Settings” > “General”) for a blog post title that looks something like this:
A post from our test blog with the title “Image borders”
The default patterns you see in this area were created to be very SEO friendly by default, and should typically be left as-is. But if you want to fine-tune the patterns, this is a list of the different attributes of your posts or pages which you can use to create custom title tag patterns:
- %blog_name% will use the site title entered in your “Settings” > “General” area.
- %blog_description% will use the tagline entered in your “Settings” > “General” area.
- %category_title% will use the name of the category page being viewed.
- %post_title% will use the title of the individual blog post being viewed.
- %archive_title% will use the date of the archive page being viewed.
- %page_title% will use the title of the individual WordPress page being viewed.
- %search% will use the search query entered in the site search.
The “»” double-chevron appearing between each item is merely a visual seperator for multiple items. You may replace this with different text if you want, such as the “|” vertical pipe character, a simple space, a hyphen, or anything else you want.
Each title tag pattern may use a combination of plain text and/or special tags as needed.
