SEO Issues
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I am trying to optimise my customer’s site for search engines and no matter what I do I cannot get Google (or any search engine) to reflect my settings, Google seems to be ignoring the crucial information in the “title” and “head” tags plus any settings in the various SEO plugins I have tried.
In fact the customer’s website itself even seems unable to correctly reflect the site’s title, instead of “SITE NAME | SITE DESCRIPTION” that should be in the browser’s title bar it only shows the SITE NAME and ignores the separator and SITE DESCRIPTION that should follow.
I did manage to get the title bar to correctly show “SITE NAME | SITE DESCRIPTION” by completely replacing the default code in the “title” tag, but I have now restored that to the purchased theme’s default code for the purpose of submitting this issue.
I urgently need to put SEO in place for this customer’s website but no matter what I try the site’s title still appears in Google as just the URL with no description.
I can’t be certain, but I have the strong feeling that this issue may have some root in something I noticed was broken in the theme when I first bought it and installed it. I’m not sure of the extent of the issue, but at the top of the main stylesheet the “Theme Name” just says “WordPress Theme Number” rather than the actual theme’s number, this is also reflected in how the theme is displayed/named in the “Themes” panel and also the dropdown list in the “Editor” panel.
Instead of the theme being named “theme1359” where it should be, it is instead called “WordPress Theme Number”. When I tried to change this in the stylesheet to the correct theme number, my customer’s site completely broke down and some aspects of it reverted to the default appearance of the original purchased theme.
I find it hard to believe that this issue isn’t somehow related to the issue I am seeking help for. I submitted a ticket to Template Monster and they are shirking any responsibility for the problem citing it as a WordPress “engine” issue. I have trouble believing that given I have half a dozen other WordPress sites on my plate at the moment which aren’t experiencing this problem.
The site URL is: https://www.bagatellabitumen.com
If you search “Bagatella Bitumen” on Google you’ll see that the search listing is completely devoid of any SEO.
Happy to provide whatever info is needed to get this problem resolved. Below is some of the opening code in from “header.php”, as you’ll see one of the meta tags isn’t closed, for starters:
<!DOCTYPE html> <html <?php language_attributes(); ?>> <head> <!DOCTYPE html> <html <?php language_attributes(); ?>> <head> <title><?php if ( is_category() ) { echo 'Category Archive for "'; single_cat_title(); echo '" | '; bloginfo( 'name' ); } elseif ( is_tag() ) { echo 'Tag Archive for "'; single_tag_title(); echo '" | '; bloginfo( 'name' ); } elseif ( is_archive() ) { wp_title(''); echo ' Archive | '; bloginfo( 'name' ); } elseif ( is_search() ) { echo 'Search for "'.wp_specialchars($s).'" | '; bloginfo( 'name' ); } elseif ( is_home() ) { bloginfo( 'name' ); echo ' | '; bloginfo( 'description' ); } elseif ( is_404() ) { echo 'Error 404 Not Found | '; bloginfo( 'name' ); } elseif ( is_single() ) { wp_title(''); } else { echo wp_title( ' | ', false, right ); bloginfo( 'name' ); } ?></title> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1"> <meta name="description" content="<?php wp_title(); echo ' | '; bloginfo( 'description' ); ?>" /> <meta charset="<?php bloginfo( 'charset' ); ?>" /> <link rel="profile" href="https://gmpg.org/xfn/11" /> <link rel="icon" href="<?php bloginfo( 'template_url' ); ?>/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" /> <link rel="pingback" href="<?php bloginfo( 'pingback_url' ); ?>" /> <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="<?php bloginfo( 'name' ); ?>" href="<?php bloginfo( 'rss2_url' ); ?>" /> <link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="<?php bloginfo( 'name' ); ?>" href="<?php bloginfo( 'atom_url' ); ?>" />
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