Discover the difference between WordPress Page/Post titles & META Title Tags

Jul 20, 2015

I’m a big fan of the META Title Tag. It’s a little advert for every web page that can be seen away from your website. The title tag may appear in the search results or be shared on social media so it needs to be concise, well written and very clickable.

Check out my webinar that’s all about how the Title tag can attract more clicks.

WordPress is arguably the most popular and user friendly content management system out there. It’s free, it works on just about any web server and at the time of writing powers almost a quarter of all websites. Its very popular but out of the box it doesn’t do a very good job with META titles.

The META Title is the Page Title with added extras

Web pageIf you use WordPress without an SEO plugin then the blog post/page title becomes the META Title tag with the name of your website added on the end.

For example this page would be:

Discover the difference between WordPress Page/Post titles & META Title Tags | SEO & Social Media Training in Birmingham, Manchester & London”

This is way too long! Its not very user friendly.

A better title would be:

“The difference between WordPress post/page titles & META Titles”

With a fresh install there’s not really a way to make this happen. You have to use the default of page title with added blog name as the META Title.

In most cases this means the title tag will be very long and not very attractive for your visitor to click on.

Separate your on page title & META Title

In a perfect world we’d like to make the META title slightly different to the Wordpress post/page title.

We can use the META title tag to help attract people to the page as its seen away from your website. The page/post title can then say a little bit more about what the page is about.

As I mentioned at the top of the page, the title tag is really important as its like a little advert for your page and will have to compete with all the noise around it on the Internet so you need to make it count.

Install a plugin to control your META Title

PluginOne of the powerful things about WordPress is that you can install plugins to give you more functionality so my advice is to install an SEO plugin that will allow you to have a lot more control.

Try Yoast, SEO Ultimate or the All In One SEO pack.

These plugins will provide you with extra boxes on your page/post edit screen to add the META Title, META Description and a whole lot more.

Fill in these boxes on every page of your website or blog and make them count.

Conclusion

Creating attractive title tags can really help generate clicks to your website so take a little time over them, include the main key phrase for the page and also use a power or sell word plus a call to action to attract even more clicks.

Writing a separate META Title gives you the opportunity to say a little more with your on-page post title which can be a bit longer.

If you have any questions or thoughts then leave them in the comments below or send me a quick Tweet.