scriptygoddess16 Mar, 2010
SEO Plugins and problems with the titles not rewriting (WordPress)
Posted by: Jennifer In: WordPress| WordPress Hacks
I can't speak for anyone else who has run into this problem, but I know I have run into it on more than one occasion. Having just figured out my particular issue this time, I'm making a note for myself (and anyone else who may have the same problem).
You may run into this problem if you have a template that you have "hardcoded" the header (in my case – it was a custom page template that actually needed a completely different header than the rest of the site – so I opted not to use "get_header()" on this template and just put the custom header right there in my custom page template…)
I *did* remember to include the "wp_head()" – so that wasn't the issue (although I have fogotten to do that on other occasions and that will cause all kinds of trouble, including seo plugin stuff not working) – but in this case – the other meta tags were coming in – but the titles weren't being rewritten.
The problem was the fact that I wasn't using get_header() – this must be the function that kicks off the search for that title tag and replaces it with the rewritten titles. If you don't use get_header() – your titles will not be rewritten.
You will run into the same problem even if you don't "hardcode" your header – and use the "include" line instead:
include( TEMPLATEPATH . '/header2.php' );
Whatever happens with "get_header()" – you need to run it to get those titles working.
(I've since updated this post – scroll down to the bottom for the simplest solution!!)
So if you have a different header for your page template – what you need to do is within your header.php – determine which header file it should load in… but ONLY AFTER you have the title tags written out… You could even use the "is_page_template()" function to figure out which header to pull in.
So my header.php looked something like this for this project I was running into with this:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<title><?php wp_title('«', true, 'right'); ?> <?php bloginfo('name'); ?></title>
<?php
if (is_page_template('my-custom-page-template1.php') || is_page_template('my-custom-page-template2.php')) {
include( TEMPLATEPATH . '/my-custom-page-template-header.php' );
} else {
?>
... rest of the header is here...
<?php } // endif custom page template checking... ?>
Now you can put your custom header in that "my-custom-page-template-header.php" (or whatever you want to call it) and on your "my-custom-page-template1.php and my-custom-page-template2.php, etc just use get_header() at the top like normal.
Actually – here's an even better/simpler option:
Name your custom header like this:
header-my-customheader.php.
Then when you call "get_header()" – do so like this:
get_header('my-customheader');
As you get requests from clients now that we're in a new year to change the copyright year in the footer – do yourself a favor and use this instead so you never have to do it again. 
