Project Bloodhound: How to make Google your weblog’s best friend

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

[This is one of the all-time most popular posts on BloodhoundBlog. I’m reprising it for Project Bloodhound, first because it’s a nice leveraged SEO solution, and second because it’s a painless introduction to customizing the PHP in WordPress. –GSS]

 
Who can probe all the mysteries of Google? Not me, and I don’t even do referrals on the subject. But I can give you a 93% solution to the problem, and you can worry about the other 7% when you’re not too busy handling incoming traffic.

What’s the secret? Like this: Relevance equals Title plus Headline plus Body Copy. If those three elements are in close correspondence, to Google the article is what it says it is. If that sounds like a Zestimate of a burned down house, it’s because it is. Software cannot evaluate objectively, it can only draw inferences from trusted indicators. If you leave a trail of indicators that Google associates with highly-relevant content, then it is highly-relevant content.

I’ve talked about writing headlines and body copy that are long-tail keyword rich. If you have a WordPress weblog, here’s a way to get your post’s title to correspond to its headline:

<title>
<?php wp_title(" "); ?>
<?php if(wp_title(" ", false)) { echo " | "; } ?>
YourBlogName | 
Your blog's tagline...
</title>

Here is what that code says:

If there is a headline, show it as the title of the page. On your main page, there is no title. On archive or category pages, the archive or the category will be the title.

If we did show a title, lay down a vertical bar as punctuation.

Then show the weblog’s name and tag line, separated by a vertical bar.

Altogether, the code means that when your post is shown as a standalone weblog entry, the title of that page will be the headline of the post. This is the way Google will see it for indexing purposes. And what that means is that Google will regard your post as being highly relevant.

You can snag a copy of the code you see above by clicking here. The file you need to edit is named “header.php”. You’ll find it in the folder for your active theme inside the “themes” folder of the “wp-content” folder of the WordPress installation on your file server. You want to replace the existing title tag with your edited version of the code shown here. If you don’t know exactly what I just said, take this problem to someone who does.

The cool thing is, once you made this change, Google will index all your old pages with their new titles, as well. In the long run, all of your long-tail keywords should benefit.
< ?php include ("REWL101.php"); ?>

 
Getting in touch with your inner geek:

• Apprehending Realtor 2.0: Seven essential skills of the 21st century real estate agent…
• How to make fast, flexible web pages…
• Catch your kid doing something right: Our son Cameron and the upgrade path of SlideShowMarge
• How to make Google your weblog’s best friend…
• Speaking in tongues: Presentable PHP in WordPress
• Speaking in tongues: Dynamically updated lists of links in PHP
• Speaking in tongues just for Cheryl Johnson: Building content-rich custom web sites in PHP
• Speaking in tongues for Morgan Brown: A quick and dirty contributors’ blogroll
• Speaking in tongues: A step-by-step guide to speaking in web sites

Want more? Real Estate Weblogging 101 will speak to your inner geek.

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