Optimize This Page Title
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Please optimize this page title! It’s so boring I’m sure you wouldn’t want to steal it. Seriously, in this article I’m going to explain what page titles are (as opposed to post titles or article titles) and how and why to optimize them. We might even come up with a better title for this article along the way.
Look at the top of your browser, above the address bar and the line of links labeled File, Edit, etc. Next to the symbol for the browser itself you’ll find a title. That is the page title. It should not be confused with the actual title of this article, even though the two read nearly the same.
In HTML, you specify a web page’s title in its title element. You use title tags, like so:
<title>This is a web page title</title>
With some content management or blogging systems, you can specify a title tag that is different from the title you give to the post or article on that page. You might find that very desirable for SEO purposes. Other CMS platforms might not have that functionality built in, but boast plug-ins that extend their native capabilities. For example, the popular blogging platform WordPress isn’t optimized for SEO, but Stephan Spencer has created the SEO Title Plugin for it. This lets you do exactly what I’m talking about here – use a different title for your post and your web page.
You may want to optimize both your page title and your article/post title. Since the two have different purposes, you may even want to have two significantly different titles. There’s nothing wrong with that, as long as both of them are relevant. You may also choose to make your page title and your article/post title the same (or nearly so), as you’ll find we do on many of our pages. There’s nothing wrong with that, either.
But maybe you’re wondering why you should optimize your page title at all. Or perhaps you’ve put a few keywords into your title and you figure you’re done. Or maybe you came up with a page title that you believe is good enough to use on every page of your site. I’ll explain why you want to optimize your page titles as soon as I stop cringing.
Next: Page Titles Make You a Star >>
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