DISQUS

AndyBeard · 1 year ago

Some things to consider

Your post title will appear in RSS feeds and get used by a large number of people giving you backlinks, even the splogs.
Social bookmark plugins will pick up the page title, not your headline

There are good reasons to make your initial headline useful for SEO, and if it is written for high CTR then it is also potentially something better to have in the SERPs as well.

Barry Welford · 1 year ago

Of course you're right, Andy. My Headline for this post is deliberately more black and white than it needs to be to attract more interest among readers in social media. However if you see the Title and the Headline as two opportunities to tune the message, that gives extra flexibility. All I'm suggesting is that the priority target for the Title can be the robot, while the priority target for the Headline can be the human visitor.

gabs · 1 year ago

One great way to see high CTR on titles is to monitor forums in the niche as if the forum ranks you are able to see the cross section between members and SERP clicks on the threads title..

Katy Castro · 1 year ago

Great post and explanation. I'll have to look into the SEO Title Tag plugin. I've heard a few things about it but haven't ever taken the time to really look into it and see how useful it could be for me when I'm already running the All in One SEO Pack.

Also, thank you for the link back to my tutorial on I'm Blogging That.

Barry Welford · 1 year ago

Happy to see you here, Katy. I wouldn't think you need the SEO Title Tag since the All in One SEO Pack does that and much more.

graywolf · 1 year ago

You know it's amazing how many CMS systems don't have the ability to create different titles, headlines and URL's out of the box. good post.

Barry Welford · 1 year ago

Thank you, Michael. You're right and it's worth adding descriptions to that list since Google seems to find them important, even if they don't affect rankings.

KenJones · 1 year ago

Really useful post Barry. I've just started using WordPress with the all-in-one SEO plugin so thanks for providing the link to Katy's post as well, that'll really help to learn some of the finer points of using the pack.

Barry Welford · 1 year ago

I'm glad you like it, Ken. I'm enthusiastic about the ability of the plugin, particularly if you put the extra effort in for your more noteworthy posts.

Anita Campbell · 1 year ago

Barry, Great article. Your advice about focusing on the first 155 characters is something I will be sharing with my team.

And there ya go! Another useful use for Twitter (with its 142 character limit) -- perfect way to practice getting to the point early.

Anita

Barry Welford · 1 year ago

Thanks, Anita. You can't guarantee that Google will choose to use your 155 characters in its snippet, but when it does it certainly gives a more enticing entry.

Charlotte Babb · 1 year ago

I've been using James Brausch's Glyphius to help me write headlines that search engines like. It lets me try different variations and scores them for effectiveness against its database. It even counts characters so I can optimize for Twitter or other short snippets.

Barry Welford · 1 year ago

That's interesting, Charlotte. However I'll be looking into it to write my Titles rather than my Headlines. If I find it's created something memorable for humans too, then I'd use the same for both. Thanks for the suggestion.

Annie Maloney · 1 year ago

Barry, Great article! Lots of good information. Its amazing how many times I still see "Home Page" as the title for a page. Many people are still using the same meta description by default on all their pages and unfortunatley, like greywolf said, there are still some CMSs that do not allow these fields to be edited or optimized. This is a good start and explanation for some on-site SEO that is easy to understand even for the most novice of bloggers/site creators.

Bob · 1 year ago

I get the title, description, etc. but do adding track backs help at all?

Barry Welford · 1 year ago

Bob, I assume you mean allowing others to track-back to your post. In effect this is a back-link to use Google's term (Yahoo! calls it an inlink). Such links provided they're from authoritative websites are certainly useful in gaining higher Google rankings.

Hank · 1 year ago

Insightful article on a topic that seems to confuse many.

Vic · 1 year ago

I find that the All in One SEO Pack PlugIn is a must for every Wordpress install. I find it crazy how many times I see a Wordpress blog that is just a plain install with at most permalinks and no SEO enhancing plugins, when in fact one of the huge benefits of using software like wordpress is the availability of having a non technical user install plugins to upgrade their software.

edwin · 1 year ago

I fully agree, although making headlines which can humor humans as well as bots, is the key to succes.

eibmoz · 1 year ago

Very useful information.
One of my first mistakes was when adding new pages was i didnt change the description tags, so all pages had the same. Not long after these went into google's suplemental index.
The title and description tags are very important to both search engine and visitor.
Thanks!

Gina the Aflam Girl · 1 year ago

Hi,
thanks for your great tutorial....i am happy and proud to announce i am using most of it already, also installed the SEO plugin and i am working on tweaking it for perfect results....merci. Gina.

Dave Links · 1 year ago

Right on. I normally try to craft the title tag for robots yet still makes some sense to humans, and similarly craft the headline for humans while still good enough for the robots and let that headline automatically end up in the url (via the permalink feature). However, it does make sense to make the page url more memorable, so perhaps from now on I will also try to shorten the page url name with quick edit before hitting the publish button.

Tampa Gas Scooters · 1 year ago

I employ a very similar strategy as Dave. It is a fine balance between catering to the engines, and making sure that your site is sticky enough for people to find what they are looking for if they decide to come back.

One Way Link Building · 1 year ago

Good tips everyone. I think the overall sentiment is that you cannot go without SEO-All-In-One plugin! It simply provides more title and meta description flexibility if you choose to use it, even on a per post/page basis.

However, if a beginner does not want to deal with plugins in the beginning, he/she needs to take that extra minute to tweak the site title and tag in the settings->general menu, and then make the settings->permalinks to be custom structured to: /%postname%/

That's the bare minimum, and can go a long way to at least get the site's home page ranked decently if not in too competitive of a market. =)

Trailers · 1 year ago

I have downloaded this recomended plugins. It is easy to use also for novice webmasters and the SEO of your blog will be mutch better.

Anthony · 1 year ago

Good article. many write for the search engines these days and forget about the people.

Sharepoint Training Course · 1 year ago

I am one who is definitely guilty of using All in One SEO plugin straight out of the box... I really need to go back into the settings and check what else it's capable of.

But I disagree with the notion of some comments of catering to search engines vs humans. I am coming straight from a corporate intranet background where my organization just wants to find files/pages. This SMM thing is completely new to me so I guess I need to get with the times. But I still contend that having zippy catchy titles won't help the audience find what they are looking for. They want that policy NOW!

I'm still of the belief this is the case for the Internet at large. You're catering to a specific readership with SMM but there's a bigger fish to catch with SEO.

Dave @ E-tail · 1 year ago

I think it's very important to get a good call to action inside your title. There's nothing more frustrating than to get a top 3 (thanks to a SEO written title) but no visitors or a lot of visitors but no conversions.

Another great Wp plugin to get custom titles, etc is the headspace plugin.

Dave

Web Template Fiend · 1 year ago

Write for humans, and the keywords will follow. Don't think about keyword density or get too obsessive with keywords. Write compelling content and you will snag repeat visitors to your site. I've seen some awful content that's clearly written only with search engines in mind. I find that kind of thing very off-putting, and that site has lost me for good. You'll rank better if people link to you, and how do you get links if your content is shoddy? Keep it simple - concentrate on your audience and everything else will fall into place.

Eva White · 1 year ago

I was under the impression that meta description helps but I did not know the standard 155 characters or less also adds to the advantage. I changed my meta description as soon as I read the post and made it to exactly 151 words. Thanks Barry.

Husqvarna · 1 year ago

The limit on the meta description is really just to prevent your description looking too spammy. It should be short and concise to describe the page with a good variance of keywords.