For basic control of your site's search engine optimization, ProPhoto offers options in the "ProPhoto > Settings > Advanced > SEO" area. (If you are looking for how to rank higher in search, see our SEO Best Practices guides instead.)
'Title Tag' Text
ProPhoto offers title tag options for every post and page type within your site.
Title tags can be found in the "<head>" area of the source code:
and are typically seen by site visitors in their browser's window along the top or in the tab.
(It can also used when a visitor creates a bookmark or 'favorite' of one of your sites pages.) But more importantly, the title tag is also critical for search engine optimization since it is used to create the 'title' text which shows up in search results.
The default patterns you see in the "ProPhoto > Settings > Advanced > SEO" area were created to be very SEO friendly by default, and should typically be left as-is. But, if you want to fine-tune the title tags, you can do so.
Adding plain text to any of the fields in this area will print that exact text to the title of that page. For example, if you entered just the text "Andy Dwyer Awesome Sauce Posts" into the "Title tags on single posts pages" field here:
...every single post page type would get a title tag of "Andy Dwyer Awesome Sauce Posts" as you see here:
In addition to using plain text, there are also a variety of special tags that start and end with "%" that can pull specific info from your site or page directly into the title. For example, the default pattern in the "Title tags on single posts pages" field is actually:
%post_title% » %blog_name%
which would combine the text from your post title (%post_title%), followed by the » double-chevron character (»), then the Site Title text (%blog_name%) for a blog post title tag that looks something like this:
Here is a list of these different attributes from your posts or pages which you can use to create custom title tag patterns:
- %blog_name% will use the Site Title entered in the "Settings" > "General" area.
- %blog_description% will use the Tagline entered in the "Settings" > "General" area.
- %category_title% will use the name of the category page being viewed.
- %post_title% will use the title of the individual blog post being viewed.
- %archive_title% will use the date of the archive page being viewed.
- %page_title% will use the title of the individual WordPress page being viewed.
- %search% will use the search query entered in the site search.
The "»" double-chevron appearing between each item is merely a visual separator for multiple items. (It is denoted by the » HTML snippet in the example above.) You may replace this with different text if you want, such as the "|" vertical pipe character, a simple space, a hyphen, or anything else you want. Each title tag pattern may use a combination of plain text and/or special tags as needed.
'Meta Description Tag' Text
A meta description is often used in search engine results and will display below the page's title tag in search results. For example:
The meta description doesn't help your site rank higher, but can help you get more visits if it helps people determine that your site has what they're searching for.
In the "ProPhoto > Settings > Advanced > SEO" area, you can create a custom description for your own site's homepage.
The meta description is a brief sentence or two describing succinctly the content and purpose of your page. If this area is left blank, ProPhoto will use your site's "Tagline", which is set under "Settings > General" in your WordPress admin area.
Check the "use excerpts..." box in this settings area (see screenshot above) and ProPhoto will use any custom excerpt text as the description of your post. To create custom excerpt text, just look for the Excerpt box in your editor screen when you're working on your post.
When you fill in custom Excerpt text for your posts, and you've checked the option to use excerpts as your meta description, you'll have specific per-post control over the text shown in search.
Auto-generate meta descriptions when no excerpt
While you can create custom excerpts for posts, custom page excerpts are not the default in WordPress. So check the "auto-generate meta description" box (see screenshot above) and ProPhoto will use the first few lines of post/page text when Excerpt text hasn't been supplied manually by you. Static pages don't have a per-page meta description option so keep in mind that the description will consist of the first few lines of text in the page. If left unchecked, ProPhoto will simply use whatever text you enter into the custom description box on each page as its meta desription.
If you prefer to be able to set meta descriptions on a per post/page basis, then you may want to look into an SEO plugin that give this more granular control, like Yoast SEO.
'Meta Keyword Tag' Text
In the early days of search engines, using tons of meta keywords became such an abused and inaccurate technique for getting search hits, that search engines dramatically reduced the value of keywords within their results. Today engines like Google give ZERO weight to keywords in their search rankings. That said, we like to give our users control, so if you enjoy wasting time and still want to add them to your site for some reason, you can enter keywords for your site here, separated by commas with a limit of 10.
Checking the "use post tags" check box will also use any Wordpress tags on your posts as keywords on that page.
Individual words vs. phrases
Again, search engines will not factor meta keywords at all into search results, but, if you do decide to add them, it is not recommended to dream up the precise search phrases visitors might search for. This could actually cause search engines to downgrade your site if they think you're SEO spamming. So avoid the temptation of repeating words in a different ways:
new york wedding photographer, new york photographer wedding, wedding photographer new york
Instead, it should be simplified to something like this:
new york, wedding, photographer
Search engines are smart enough to figure out all the variations for you.
Capitalization and plurals
Additionally, it is not necessary to account for capitalization or plurals for your search words - again, search engines are intelligent and will handle this for you. It's best to stick with the 'basic' form of any word and let the search engines handle the rest:
los angeles, Los angeles, Los Angeles, newborn, Newborn, baby, Baby, babies, Babies, portrait, portraits, Portrait, Portraits
should be simplified to something like this:
los angeles, newborn, baby, portrait
Prevent duplicate content
Search engines may penalize you for what is perceived as "duplicate content" on your site - this can actually cause your pages to rank lower than normal. A common negative practice is to 'spam' your own site with keywords to boost search results. Search engines will attempt to look for these patterns of repeated content.
Blogs are prone to having duplicate content because Posts can be seen on the homepage, archive page, category page, etc. Use this ProPhoto option to block search engines from indexing certain types of pages to reduce your risk of 'duplicate content' penalty. Please note that doing this can make it harder for the search spiders to do a thorough crawl of your site, so it is probably best not to use this feature unless you have a reason to -- for example, you display the full content of posts instead of using excerpts on your date archive and category archive pages.
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