The Perfect Title Tag

In Version 2.5 Template Tag wp_title got an update, therefore Plugins became useless for that.

By the way, the code came from the Plugin „Optimal Title“.

The title tag is in the header, therefore in header.php . The following syntax works in all WP-versions, but it’s not a perfect way for WordPress higher than 2.5. I will show you a perfect title tag for WordPress 2.6 and higher.

Since version 2.5 the function wp_title has following parameters, also they are already filled and it’s not really necessary to use parameters.

• sep – delivering a separator character, separator or text before and after the post
• display – displaying title; interesting if you don’t want to display the title, instead a variable and use it furthermore
  • 1 (True) – standard
  • 0 (False)
• seplocation – left (left) or right (right) of the post title should be the character or text. Below are 2 examples how it could look like.

wp_title($sep = '»', $display = true, $seplocation = '')

The above variant for WordPress earlier than version 2.5 could look like this in WordPress Version 2.5*.

Display with different parameters seplocation looks like that. The blog name is „WordPress Book“.

Left

Right

I like to display the category, since it’s an added value for the reader, especially if they like to bookmark the page. It isn’t relevant for search engines since I limited indexing it by following:

' . "\n"; } else { echo '' . "\n";} ?>

In this combination you can replace !is_paged() ) && ( is_single() with the new tag is_front_page() on your front page. This conditional tag is available since version 2.5.

Further resources

• Documentation in Codex – wp_title
• Mark on WordPress with Tip to reorder your title tag