There are tons of great uses for having a custom post type in WordPress. One of my favorites is having sitewide control over the title and meta for that specific post type in Yoast. I mentioned this before but since it’s so incredibly handy I think it deserved some more attention.
To get started I’ve used this plugin before and had good results, you’re going to need to add a CPT. With that plugin it’s super easy.
Now you don’t have to do anything else, if everything is setup correctly this post type will now appear in Yoast “Titles & Metas”
Depending on what you’re working on, you can really geek out hard with this.
As I showed in my 1000 pages post, I used a meta description template with the %%title%% variable and it’s working like a charm.
Another setup I really like is using %%excerpt%% for the description and using advanced variables in the title.
Let’s say I had something where the date mattered, I could do:
%%title%% Widgets Available for %%currentmonth%% %%currentyear%%
This would keep my titles automatically updated with the current month and year. Which is funny looking down memory lane, I remember updating the year on my old coupon sites by hand back in 2011 – 2012 when I was a cocky noob. Ahh how times change.
Let’s take a look at a couple examples of this in the wild.
Take a look at the title tag in Moz user profiles.
It’s adding “‘s” to the persons name, “Rand Fishkin’s Profile – Moz”
Nothing to fancy there, let’s find something better.
Thank my little boy for this awesome example, I just queried “zelda costume“.
The top site is Etsy who is putting on a clinic for this exact technique. And ironically I think they had some sort of help from Moz in the past if my memory is correct.
Title: “Popular items for zelda costume on Etsy”
Google isn’t pulling their meta description on the query currently, but you can grab it from the source.
Description: Shop outside the big box, with unique items for zelda costume from thousands of independent designers and vintage collectors on Etsy.
I italicized “zelda costume” to highlight that’s the auto generated part. Gotta love it, literally ranking search result pages with zero content on a search engine.
Just an H1 with – Popular items for zelda costume
That’s some seriously sexy SEO right there. Taking that massively juiced domain and just beating the shit out of Google with it.
Hopefully this inspires you to go create something awesome. It’s a thing of beauty once you break the confines of the single default post type. Now go and dominate.
Hey Jacob…
I have similar website to Etsy and I’m really inspired by this post!!!
You’re really awesome!!
Not sure if this is a dummy, nooob question, but does it matter that the H2 is above the H1 tag on Etsy?
I wouldn’t say it matters, ideally you have it in order. But it’s not a deal breaker, obviously.
Hey Jacob, interesting article again !
I have saw some of my competitor doing this and I was wandering how. No i know ;)
But i have two question:
– We agree that the zelda costume page on Etsy was generated before ?
– Do you know a way to make clean and easy rich content snippet description. I saw that it rank well, at least give more clicks.
Spin some shit and use some PHP
bello il post