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An ever-present part of building any public website is Search Engine Optimization.  We’re often asked, “Is ExpressionEngine SEO friendly?” - the answer here is: “it sure is, if you make it so!”

While ExpressionEngine goes a long way with its URLs being human-readable and search engine friendly, there are some other tricks that one can utilize to help this along.  Remember, we control the templates, and therefore, we control what information is output and where.

One of those tricks is having a semantic <title> element for each page.  So, how do we make that title element more useful, both to our readers and to search engines?

Onwards!

I struggled with learning how to do this, as adding the entry title on a single entry page is helpful for disabled people (i.e., blind) but then I learned how to add a Comments on title on the comments page and wanted to find out how to do it on a single-post permalink page. Then, I thought of adding an entry template and stopped pulling my hair out. Whee!!!

Hi Lisa,

I just love using the Reeposition plugin for this purpose.
Using the plugin I don’t have to add another weblog tag to my template, although I have no idea which is ‘faster’ a few more queries or the plugin…

btw, there is a little typo in your weblog tag, and you could add ‘categories’ to the disable parameter.

disable="trackbacks|pagination|member_data|custom_fields|category_fields|categories"}

instead of:

disable="trackbacks|pagination|member_data|custom|fields|category_fields"}

Cheers,
Elwin

For my sties, I do something like this in my head embed:

<title>{embed:pagetitle} | My Site</title>

Then in my template, depending if its a section landing page (template group index) or an article or general site page, I do something like this:

{exp:weblog:entries limit="1" weblog="{my_weblog}" status="" disable="trackbacks|pagination|member_data|custom_fields|category_fields|categories"}
{!--head includes--}
{embed="includes/head" pagetitle="{title}"}
{/exp:weblog:entries}

or this:

{!--head includes--}
{embed="includes/head" pagetitle="Section Title"}

Updated, I re-read that code about 50 times, not sure how I missed that pipe - thanks, Elwin. =)

It’s great to see all the ideas coming forth from this. There is never any claim that it is the “One True Way”.  I hope as I post articles in the future, I’ll always get alternate methods posted - this kind of discourse is what really helps new ExpressionEngine users learn the system and see just how flexible it is.

You guys rock. =)

I know its a bit of self promotion but my LG Better Meta Extension + Plugin allows you to customise your ExpressionEngine entries and add other meta data like descriptions/summaries that will drastically improve your SEO.

Basically it adds another tab in the publish/edit form that allows you to customise the following for each entry:

- author
- title
- description
- keywords
- publisher
- rights
- identifier
- date created
- date modified
- date valid
- instructions for robots
- site title

The plugin also generates Dublin Core MetaData and HTML Meta tags which can be customised using a template.

Page titles are only they first step towards SEO. The most important thing is your content and the page titles should reflect it.

I just installed—I am impressed! Thanks for writing it.

I just installed—I am impressed! Thanks for writing it.

Thanks Midori

If your enjoy the extension why not donate towards its development / buy me a coffee 😊

Cheers Leevi

Update: I hope your talking about LG Better Meta :red:

I have just updated LG Better Meta which takes care of a few bugs! Grab it from my site

What I like to do is create a custom field for the page titles something like page-title or extended-title.  That way I can make the titles more search engine friendly and get a few extra keywords by rephrasing the entry’s title a bit.  A smart way to think about your page title is to think about how it would read on Google.  Is it attention grabbing?  You can also a set the maximum characters to something around 60-65 so the page title shows up in entirety in the search engine.  I chose to use 60 because that is the maximum allowed for Digg and I also use the extented-title for the auto population of the title when an article is Dugg from my site.  Here’s an example of the code that I use for my custom page titles.

{exp:weblog:entries weblog="{current_blog}" disable="trackbacks|member_data|category_fields|pagination|categories" rdf="off" limit="1"}
<title>{if extended-title}{extended-title}{if:else}{title}{/if} - Your Site Here </title>
{/exp:weblog:entries}

Above I’ve added an if statement so that if you are applying this to a weblog that already has entries so you do not lose all your page titles, however future entries will have the extended title applied.  If you’re starting a new blog you can leave out the if statement and simply use the extended-title field as long as you make it a required custom field.