Customising how your page headers are displayed for search engines

Background

The default way your page title headers appear in browser window's title bar and subsequently in search engine results like google.com is as follows:

This is widely regarded as the best approach, as people reading English read from left-to-right and are usually using a search engine to search for a topic, rather than a specific site. Therefore, it's arguably more ergonomic to leave the Drupal default.

Changing how your page titles are constructed

Drupal's flexibility allows you to change the way your page titles are constructed to whatever you want and dynamically, based on what page or section your content is in.

Step 1 of 1

The following only applies to Drupal sites using phptemplate based themes.

1. Open your page.tpl.php file in a text editor like notepad.exe or equivalent.
2. At the very top of the file, you should see the following line
   <title>
<?php print $head_title; ?>
</title>

3. Change it to this:
   <title>
<?php
print "$node->title | $site_name | $site_slogan";
?>
</title>

4. As the variable names suggests, that re-orders your page tite to read: NODE TITLE | SITE NAME | SITE SLOGAN
5. Upload your edited page.tpl.php file to your active theme folder for the changes to take effect.

Available variables

The following is a list of relevant variable names that are available to the page.tpl.php file by default.

For a full list of all the variables available, visit the page.tpl.php overview page in the phptemplate section of the handbook.

• site: The name of the site, always filled in.
• site_name: The site name of the site, to be used in the header, empty when display has been disabled.
• site_slogan: The slogan of the site, empty when display has been disabled.
• title: Title, different from head_title, as this is just the node title most of the time.
• breadcrumb: HTML for displaying the breadcrumbs at the top of the page.
• mission: The text of the site mission.
• is_front: True if the front page is currently being displayed. Used to toggle the mission.
• footer_message: The footer message as defined in the admin settings.