Optimize homepage title and description tags in WordPress

The <title> corresponding to the title displayed at the top of web pages is one of the points that we should not neglect in terms of referencing and readability. The title and meta description of home page must be relevant and closely linked with the content of the whole website. We need to be a bit elaborative before going to further details.

The title tag of an article appearing in the browser is that which appears in the results of search engines. Thus, a person who searches for “wordpress themes” will lead to a result more easily named simply “30 WordPress Themes (3 columns)” and “My great blog – Blog Archive – Topics Wordpres …” because not Only the titles are too long cut off by Google, but it adds unnecessary information that interferes with reading. We wrote long ago about meta description tag in WordPress for individual posts; you can read that too.

Blogging platforms like WordPress has a structure as that ensures that the title will be different depending on the page where you will find: single item, home page, archives, categories. Quite often the blog title appears in all page titles, which not only does not reflect the exact content of the page but also add additional keywords. In SEO, the more keywords, the more dilution of the weight of each of these keywords.

We can say, success of a blog also depends one more thing : this the optimization of home page title description and usage of Meta description.

You will ask why? Because, lot of people (including ourself at the starting) gives the title of homepage as the name of their domain name. This is wrong. Do you know why? Unless you are a big brand (and in that case you will not read this post, you will hire the best SEO expert, right?); no one (except you) will search with your domain name. To Google, the homepage is just another page (we are keeping it simple, it is not that easy though); if it is a bit elaborative just like another post pages; so, the chance increases to get in search results for some other searches too. Simply we mean use keywords to describe your website’s title.

This is the reason why TheCustomizeWindows.com homepage appears in Google (U.S.) search result with certain key-phrases associated with WordPress. If we kept it TheCustomizeWindows, the home page would never appear in SERP, simply the keywords are Customize and Windows : there is no WordPress.

The principle is same for home page meta description; except that not only Google bot but also people will read it; so it needs to be a normal readable sentence enriched with keywords.

Meta keywords has no value to Google, but it is better to fill it too.

How to set the home page meta description and title?

Easy. You can do it from WordPress module Settings > General and also from different SEO packs like Platinum SEO pack; All in one SEO pack, Headspace2 etc. Some themes like Genesis, Thesis, Elegant theme also support this. Check page source code for duplicate meta generated by all these in one blog and correct if there are duplicates.

How to check the effectiveness?

There are many online tool available, we like SEOcentro’s tool. There are some bugs as it can not analyze your 2000 posts (for example), so you should tailer a bit.

The old grandfather’s method of optimization by using one word, it’s plural, it’s typo etc. does not work for Google now. Example is: Customize Windows, Customize Window,cutomize window…so on. Google rather might punish you for such behavior because in the above example, Window and Windows is completely different thing. But might work for Bing. But, definitely you will target Google, not Bing.