[wp-docs] Redundancy in article titles

Jennifer Hodgdon yahgrp at poplarware.com
Mon Apr 30 15:41:47 GMT 2007


> To me, using WordPress in page title implies a general lack of
> inventiveness, and adds unnecessary flak in the form of redundant
> words to the title. "WordPress" is already there is the URL -
> codex.wordpress.org. That should keep the search engines happy.

In regards to search engines, that is not actually true. No one really 
knows exactly what the algorithms are for Google (or any other search 
engine), but the general consensus in the SEO community is that if 
someone searches for particular keywords, the order the results appear 
is based on some combination of (a) page title (with a higher weight 
given to words earlier in the title) (b) URL (c) words appearing in 
text of the page, with the most weight on H1, less for H2, etc. (d) 
the site's overall credibility ranking (based on in-bound and 
out-bound links).

So actually, if the objective is to ensure that codex articles appear 
with the highest possible rank in search results when people search 
for things such as "wordpress themes", the page titles should all 
start with WordPress (this could be done by adjusting the page 
template, of course).

Anyway, I still don't think a hard-and-fast rule about not having 
WordPress in page titles is really necessary or a good idea. What are 
you going to call the "Working with WordPress" article, for instance? 
"Working"? That makes no sense to me. And it is NOT true that 
corporate "About" pages do not have the company name in the page title.

      Jennifer


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