Fixing Wordpress Title and Description Tag Placement
-
I know how important the title and description tag are and I know it is important to have them place at the top of the code. However, when I view the source on a Wordpress template, I see it looks messy. Here is an example of what the source looks like. Is there a plugin or an adjustment to be made so the code is cleaner? To get rid of spaces and blank lines in code. Or should I just not worry about the way the code looks?
Notice the first example has a break after the <title>, then after the title there is this</p> <p style="color: #5e5e5e;"><strong><em><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /> </em></strong></p> <p style="color: #5e5e5e;"><strong><em> </em></strong>then the description? Can that be moved?</p> <p style="color: #5e5e5e;"> </p> <p style="color: #5e5e5e;"><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"></span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><br /></span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="ltr" lang="en-US"></span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><br /></span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><span> </span><head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11"></span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><br /></span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><span> </span><title></span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><br /></span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><span> </span>tite text goes here <span> </span></title> " />
Here there are no breaks after <title>and the <title> is directly above the description</p> <p style="color: #5e5e5e;"> </p> <p style="color: #5e5e5e;"><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"></span></p> <p style="color: #5e5e5e;"><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"> </span><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="ltr" lang="en-US"></span></p> <p style="color: #5e5e5e;"><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11"></span></p> <p style="color: #5e5e5e;"><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /></span></p> <p style="color: #5e5e5e;"><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><title>tite text goes here</title>
-
RDK is right on. I would add some sites go a step further and compress their html code. This step improves the page loading speed a tiny bit as it saves the browser from having to do this work. Reading the html code becomes much more difficult when all the spaces are removed.
-
Viewing the source will look different, depending on how you're getting the source into an editor. On many CRM (wordpress, joomla, etc) the source code can display differently than it is stored on the back-end.
Luckily, spaces don't matter. They are essentially deleted when a browser renders them.
The title and description tags must be in the section and it doesn't matter where they are within the head section . Just make sure they don't come after the tag.
Don't worry, be happy.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Correct robots.txt for WordPress
Hi. So I recently launched a website on WordPress (1 main page and 5 internal pages). The main page got indexed right off the bat, while other pages seem to be blocked by robots.txt. Would you please look at my robots file and tell me what‘s wrong? I wanted to block the contact page, plugin elements, users’ comments (I got a discussion space on every page of my website) and website search section (to prevent duplicate pages from appearing in google search results). Looks like one of the lines is blocking every page after ”/“ from indexing, even though everything seems right. Thank you so much. FzSQkqB.jpg
On-Page Optimization | | AslanBarselinov1 -
Website Titles in Google
I currently have a Wordpress platform website and previously I noticed that when I optimized my pages, if I indicated what I wanted my page names to be (through an application like SEO Yoast) that most times, the keyword would show up exactly how I had it typed in. Recently I have noticed that the title of my website is showing in my page titles too. So for example: Before: Shoe Stores Windsor - XYZ Company Now: XYZ Company | Shoe Stores Windsor - XYZ Company In SEO practices, I know it's most often best to have the keyword you would like as close to the front of your title tag, but now this recent search adds my website title first. Plus this also seems to be making my titles longer. I know Google ultimately has the 'final say' in a page title and I have ensured that I have the "rewrite titles/descriptions option" check in Wordpress to allow me to overwrite titles, but I am hoping someone can possibly provide me with a tip or trick to avoid this in search rankings. I think it's important to have the name of my site entered through Wordpress so that any pages that I have no optimized default to the page name and site name, but the ones I have optimized seem to be showing differently all of a sudden. Any help is greatly appreciated! Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | MainstreamMktg0 -
Wordpress blog duplicate issue
So after looking at the set up of the blog ive found this. http://www.trespass.co.uk/blog/ http://www.trespass.co.uk/blog/category/news/ http://www.trespass.co.uk/blog/category/general/ http://www.trespass.co.uk/blog/category/snow/ Content shown on http://www.trespass.co.uk/blog/ can also be found on the other 3 urls. The permalink structure is set up as /%category%/%postname%/ which I want to change to just %postname% Obviously i want to make things as seo friendly as possible so any suggestions to do this right without losing any indexed pages etc. I have limited access to make changes to plugins etc aswell as these need to be done through the development company who manage our site. Cheers Robert
On-Page Optimization | | Trespass0 -
AD on wordpress
I notice advertisement hyperlinks on my site such as hyperlinks on my test gift, fill out etc. I never put hose links but somehow it shows up on firefox. Does anyone experience this? It's showing up this url http://www.soobumimphotography.com/portfolio/wedding/
On-Page Optimization | | BistosAmerica0 -
How should I fix my short meta descriptions?
I recently added meta descriptions to several community-supplied pages for our open source website http://spree.tw/N53HuO Google Webmaster Tools is complaining/warning that the meta descriptions are too short. The descriptions are being supplied by our users and they typically do not lend themselves to anything much longer than what is being entered already. I was thinking of adding some text to the end of the meta description. Something like "This is one of many third party extensions for Spree supplied free of charge by our community" or something else like that. Is it acceptable practice to reuse a snippet in your meta description like this? Do you suggest other alternatives? Since meta description doesn't affect page rank can I use terms that I'm trying to rank for on my home page without cannibalizing my link juice? TIA, Sean
On-Page Optimization | | schof0 -
SEOMOZ returns duplicate title and description
Hi, When SEOMOZ returns the crawl report results and it shows duplicate descriptions, is it referring to the meta description or is it referring to the actual product description? I have up to 30 products for many different sports teams. Since I have 30 products for as many teams, most of my products are the same and he only thing I did when I populated the site was to change the team name. I left the product description the same otherwise. Thanks, Don
On-Page Optimization | | ge01734000 -
Duplicate Title & Content in WordPress
I'm getting a lot of Crawl Errors due to duplicate content and duplicate title because of category and tag posts in WordPress. I rebuilt the sitemap and said to exclude category and tags, should that clear up the issue? I've also went through and did NO INDEX and NO FOLLOW for all categories and posts. Any thoughts on this issue?
On-Page Optimization | | seantgreen0 -
Wordpress permlinks SEO question
What are SEO advantages or disadvantages of the following - /%postname%/ - adds a trailing / /%postname% - no trailing / /%postname%.html - creates .html URL Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | SamBuck0