Change Title Display in WordPress 1

For those of you who use WordPress and want to learn how to change your titles, read on. This is definitely a techie post.

I was reading Search Engine Journal today and there was an old post that discussed reccommended WordPress Search Engine Optimization Plugins.

One of the suggestions was to put the title of your post first in the HTML <title> of your page, and then to have your Blog name displayed. I believe be default WordPress shows the title of the blog first (i.e. define: Jared Barden) and then the title of the individual post.

No problem, I thought. I logged in to my account, clicked the Presentation tab, selected the Theme Editor for my current theme, and went to the header.php file, which is where most of your header information for your post (the HTML , etc.) is located. I made some minor code changes, and everything was working, except that there was a » before the title of my post. A Google search for the wp_title() function, and a couple of forum posts later, I found at that this is the default behavior of the wp_title() function. To change this behavior, simple pass an empty string ( ” ) to the function, like so – wp_title('');.

Moral of the story – if you’re trying to do something when it comes to blogging or coding, do a Google search first. Chances are someone out there has experienced the same problem you have, and hopefully they have been nice enough to document how they conquered said problem.