As you know, title tags are the most important on-page factor. They are given the most weight out of anything on the page as far as the search engines are concerned. So it is a huge weakness in WordPress (and most other blog platforms for that matter) that the post title is used as the title tag, usually with some other extraneous bits added on like the name of the blog. That is far from optimal SEO! Instead, you should be able to handcraft your own title tags independently of the post title -- interject synonyms, rearrange the word order, and so forth.

My SEO Title Tag plugin, which has been out since middle of last year, allows you to do just that. But wait, there's more...!

I am happy to tell you that I, along with some of my talented programmers here at Netconcepts, have made a major update to the plugin. Indeed, we have really made some magic, as you shall soon see!

I'm pleased to announce the SEO Title Tag WordPress plugin... Version 2.0 beta!

The plugin now allows you to mass edit title tags for all posts, static pages, category pages, tag pages, tag conjunction pages, archive by month pages, indeed any URL, all in one go.

It also now has a title tag input box on the Edit and Write forms for pages and posts, so no more having to use the custom field box.

It allows you to set a title tag for your 404 error pages and for internal search results pages too.

Not only can you now view all your title tags across all of your posts/pages at once. You can also revise your titles right there within that report! This mass editing functionality is available under the Manage > Title Tags tab in the WordPress admin.

Here's what the mass editing admin looks like:

Maybe I am tooting my own horn a bit too much here, but I think this plugin is the best thing to have ever happened to WordPress -- as far as SEO is concerned! :-D

The plugin also plays nicely with the plethora of meta tag plugins out there, such as Add Meta Tags and Another WordPress Meta Plugin. You can choose to use category descriptions as title tags on category pages, or you can choose not to. The latter is the preferred option if you are using a meta tag plugin, because most of those use the category's description field for the meta description tag on the category page. Don't worry though! You can still set custom titles for your category pages -- even if you are using the description field for your meta descriptions.

The plugin is WordPress 2.1 compatible. If upgrading from the previous version of SEO Title Tag, be sure to deactivate the old version before installing the new version. When you activate the new version, it will create some new database tables.

I welcome any and all feedback to that plugin and I hope it is of value to all you bloggers using WordPress.

I'd love to hear of any success stories using this plugin and the rankings and traffic benefits that ensue. Please report back and regale me with your stories of hockey stick graphs! :-)

Now go get the plugin! Enjoy!

Well I've done something I wasn't supposed to do. I sat down and wrote a plug-in for WordPress. I've been "encouraged" by my fellow executives at Netconcepts not to do any programming. "Leave that to the programmers" they told me. "Stick to the strategic planning stuff and the article writing and the conference speaking that you do so well." Did I listen? Well, no.

Their loss (I guess I'll have to work on that strategic plan document over the weekend!) is your gain. I've created a whizz-bang little WordPress plugin that solves all your SEO problems in one fell swoop. Well maybe not all. But it does make the title tags across your WordPress site or blog a heck of a lot more search engine optimal than they are by default.

Here's why you'll want it:

• Free & open source
• Allows you to override the title tag with a custom one (defined through a custom field in a post or a page)
• Allows you to define a custom home page title
• Reverses the order of the blog name and the title, or drop the blog name altogether, or replace it with a shorter nickname
• Puts the tag in the title of (UltimateTagWarrior) tag pages
• Uses the category's description as the title on category pages
• Has an Options page in the admin to change settings

Who could say "No" to all that?!

Here's where to get it: SEO Title Tag

I'm open to suggestions for further improvements to the plugin. This is my first plugin, and this is a 1.0 release, so please be gentle!