Fix WordPress Formatting with wpuntexturize

While checking the visitor statistics for this month I noticed a decrease in organic searches being conducted for this website on Google. This raised a red flag for me considering most of my traffic has been coming from search engines. After some investigation I noticed one key difference between results for other sites and the results for my own. It turns out that WordPress automatically converts some punctuation from the standard set to specially formatted ones. In this case, the apostrophes in both the title of my posts and the content were being changed from ' to `. What appears to be harmless was actually preventing my posts from appearing in the listings for major search engines. Keep in mind that quotes are also affected. For example, try using your browser to find this string of text without copying and pasting it:

It`s a very nice day today.

Your browser, whether it be Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer, etc, uses the vertical ' apostrophe instead of the curly ' apostrophe. This means that if you were to search for a post such as "Dan`s Food Store" you would not be able to find it on Google.

This issue is caused by the function wptexturize. I recommend that all WordPress users download and enable the plugin wpuntexturize to disable this behavior. This will not only allow your readers to search your blog more effectively, but you will receive more traffic as a result.