SEO: WordPress Title

Optimise your Titles

The title is important for website SEO. A title is one of the few elements you can carve out yourself to entice searchers to click through to your post or page.

Google shows the first 60-70 characters of the page title in its search results, so your titles should be around this length and accurately describe your page content.

• Try to make your title keyword dense and include the primary keywords in the first few words of your page title. So ‘Four Wonderful Title Tips in WordPress for SEO’ might be better as ‘SEO: WordPress Title’.

• If you change your title as above, you might want to amend the permalink (URL) to a better match. Whilst making modifications remove any stop words ( ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘and’ etc as search engines don’t index them) and numbers (also ignored). Make changes before your post is published. If you modify your permalink after someone else has used it to link to you, then they will have a ‘broken’ link as the original will no longer exist. This can hurt your SEO.
• Do not duplicate titles. Each page or post title should be unique.
• Try to keep page titles between 50-65/70 characters. A title under 50 characters should display in its entirety when viewed on mobile devices. Any characters over the 70 limit may not be displayed at all in the search results.

And… optimise your Descriptions

If you have Genesis installed (or an SEO plugin) you will be able to create your own Custom Post/Page Meta Description (as well as a Custom Document Title if the title you’ve created in WordPress is not optimised as well as you’d like above or you want something different to the WordPress post/page title to display in search results and browser tabs).

Descriptions are used by search engines to display as a snippet in their search results. Because the meta descriptions aren’t displayed in the pages the user sees, it’s easy to let this content slide. If you don’t optimise the descriptions the search engines will just use the first few sentences (between 130 – 160 characters) found in the post/page.  Make sure your descriptions are unique, accurately describe your page content and are enticing.

Remember: meta descriptions shouldn’t be more than 160 characters although there is no magic number. For instance, if you are writing a post in WordPress search engines might add the date and that will reduce the number of characters available. Accordingly, SEO best practices for blog posts/news articles is a meta description of closer to 130 characters for the best display potential.