The difference between post titles and page titles, and why you should care

Posted by stuart as , , , ,

Yes, there is a difference!

See the bold text just above the content you’re now reading? (feed readers will need to come to the site for this one). See how it says “The difference between post titles and page titles, and why you should care”, that’s the post title.

Now look up at the top of the browser, at the bit up there in next to the firefox logo (or opera, safari, IE, whatever), the bit that says “Post titles, Page titles, and SEO for Wordpress”, that’s the page title.
As I said in a previous post, Wordpress gets a lot right as far as on-page SEO goes right out of the box, but there’s room for improvement which might just take you from also-ran to Uber-blogger.

One of the dumber things that Wordpress does is to use the same text for the post title, title tag (page title) and URL.

In this post, we’re going to look at why you should change your post title to differ from the title tag, and how to do it.

Conventional wisdom sugests that the page title is the most significant on-page factor in relevance for ranking for a given keyword. This means that we want to give our keyword absolute highest prominence in our page title. For example, the page title for this post says:

Post titles, Page titles, and SEO for Wordpress

That’s the bit that a search engine is going to give the most weight to when trying to work out what the page is about. See how I’ve pretty much targeted three keyphrases here:

1. Post titles
2. Page titles
3. SEO Wordpress

…. and through broad match, any combination of the above.

Now let’s look at the actual post title:

The difference between post titles and title page titles, and why you should care

This is the text which is going to show up as the title if your post is submitted to social bookmarking sites, in your profile in Technorati, in a feed reader, and pretty much anywhere else your post is referenced. We want this to be catchy, clever, and to grab the readers attention. Think of this as an advertisement for your post. If people only have access to your post title, and not the post content itself, we want them to be thinking “Wow, that looks interesting, I want to read that”

Of course, in Wordpress, our post title will generally appear inside a H2 tag (or a H1 in a properly optimized theme), so we still want our keywords in there, but it’s not as important as it is for our page title.

So now we understand the difference between our page title and post title, we need to know how to change them:

Enter the All In One SEO Pack. A lot of you will already have this plugin for Wordpress installed, if you don’t, go get it now, drop it in your plugins folder and activate it.

Once you have the plugin set up and activated, when you’re next writing a post, scroll down to the bottom of your post entry page, and look for the “All in one SEO Pack” section:

Here you want to enter your page title in the top box. This is the title that will appear at the top of the browser window, and the title that Search Engines will take the most notice of when trying to judge what your page is about.

So in conclusion:

• Page titles should be written for search engines, keeping your keyword at top of mind, whilst still making sense to humans.
• Post titles should be written to get the readers attention, whilst still keeping the search engines in mind as a second priority.