8×10Gallery.com

After going through the code of the template and dissecting it as best I can, I believe I understand what went wrong. I just wanted to document the problem in case someone else ran into it.

In short, the problem was every blog entry had the same title. For example, they would all say “8×10Gallery – Amateur Photography Blog”. The title I gave each article was nowhere to be found. This really doesn’t help anyone trying to find information. It basically means that every blog entry in Google would have the same name and you couldn’t tell what the article was about. Not good.

In Wordpress, each article is supposed have the name of the site, the name of the blog and the name of the article. This is controlled through the template you use and is located in the file Header.php. The actual code looks like this:

This is where the problem comes in. The Header.php file for the template I was using didn’t have this code in it. I’m not sure if this was an old template or I downloaded a test version or what the deal was, but in the end, just wasn’t working right.

After realizing I didn’t even have the right code in my template I quickly went to the Web and looked for a new one. The first step was just to try a new template and see if the blog titles changed. They did. So I knew it was the template and not the way I set up the blog; always a good sign! A bigger plus, it was easy to fix.

With a new template in place, everything was working again. Next it was time to make the actual change I went to the Web for in the first place. The default Header.php should be changed to:

This gets rid of the words “Blog Archive” in the middle of each entry and gives you a blog title of:

8×10Gallery.com – Where did the title of my blog go?

This optimization is all over the Web so you should have no problem in finding more information on this. You can do a search on “Wordpress Blog Title” and find plenty of tips on optimizing your blog. I bookmarked a great site in my previous entry if you want to jump straight in. This site even shows how to change the “About” text that I posted a few articles back. I wish I would have found this site sooner!

As with all the other SEO tips out there, you want to make sure your Blogs are getting indexed correctly; otherwise no one is ever going to find what you’re writing about. For me, the problem was a template that just didn’t parse the data correctly. Now each entry should be different so you can find me easier!

You can find more info at both of these sites:
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/01/15/wordpress-the-complete-post-install-checklist/
http://www.johnwiseman.ca/blogging/wordpress-seo/brilliant-wordpress-seo-tips-for-bloggers-and-webmasters/

Other Articles of Interest:

• Trouble with the blogs…
• Templatebrowser puts link spam in Wordpress
• The DNS Gods are angry!!
• Zoundry as a Wordpress Desktop Client
• The blog hits its first month!
• Upgrade to Wordpress 2.2 = Disaster
• More Wordpress Template Spam
• BikeBlog theme for Wordpress
• I doubt I could have made more of a mess of things if I’d tried!
• Making Wordpress Themes with Artisteer