This is the second of a two-part series on writing and using web page titles. The first post is about killer web page titles, and you can find it here.

Today, however, I want to introduce you to the three “titles” that matter on WordPress blogs, and how you use them to best advantage.

Before I do… there’s a plugin you need to know about. It’s called All-In-One SEO Pack, and it’s the one I use to manage titles for each blog post. If you haven’t already seen this I highly recommend you check it out, download it, and install it (there are a few SEO plugins like this around, but this does all I want it to so I haven’t checked out any others).

Back to the topic. The three “titles” you have available to you are:

• Post title – this is what you type into the “Title” box when you write a Wordpress page or post. There’s no secrets here – what you write is what gets displayed, and it becomes the default for the two other titles listed below.
• Post slug – this unfortunate name is actually the page URL when you have permalinks set to include the %postname% parameter (for the record, I use custom permalinks set to /%category%/%postname%/).
• Page <title> element – as you’d expect, this is what gets entered into the <title> element when Wordpress generates a single post page.

I’ll now cover these in a little more detail.

Post Title

As per yesterday’s post, this is where you need to get real creative and “hook” casual visitors to your blog into reading your content. Although it does have SEO value (it’s usually an H2 tag, and it’s also usually a bigger, bolder font), it’s main purpose is to grab the attention of your human readers.

So get creative, don’t worry too much about search engine love, and make it as catchy as you possibly can.

Post Slug

See the little box to the right of your “Write Post” and Write Page” page? You have the option of entering the page name you want, rather than accept the default that Wordpress provides.

Let’s take the title of this post. If I left the page slug box empty, and then came back later to edit the post, the page slug would be the post title with all non alphanumeric characters removed, and a hyphen in between each word.

It would be “three-titles-for-blogs-do-you-use-them-effectively”. The full page URL would be:

http://www.stratify.com.au/seo/three-titles-for-blogs-do-you-use-them-effectively/

It’s generally accepted that a web page’s URL provides some SEO juice, so I really want to be certain that my key terms are somewhere in that URL. Which, with the default value, they ain’t.

So I set my page slug to cover my key terms, for this post “seo-blog-title”, and my full page URL becomes:

http://www.stratify.com.au/seo/seo-blog-title/

That’s better! I have “seo” in there twice, plus I have references to “blog” and “title” as well.

Incidentally, what I just described is standard Wordpress functionality. You don’t need the plugin for this. But 99% of bloggers don’t worry about this insanely simple step and they end up with lower search engine ranking than they deserve.

Page <title> Element

To change this, you do need the All-In-One SEO Pack (or some other similar plugin).

In its default state, Wordpress takes your post title and inserts it between the <title> and </title> tags in the head code of your single post page. Remember, these are the pages you want the search engines to discover and index, and I covered this topic in an earlier post about robots.txt.

The <title> value is the undisputed king of on-page search engine ranking factors. So it makes a lot of sense to have this as SEO-optimised as you can.

The All-In-One SEO Pack breaks the connection between page title and post title. You are able to write a custom <title> value that doesn’t affect the way your post displays to human readers, but is picked up by the search engines as THE indicator of what your post is about.

If you leave the custom title blank, no worries! WordPress just defaults to its standard behaviour.

The All-In-One SEO Pack adds two other features that make it a must-have, even now that the latest builds of Wordpress have added automatic tagging support.

The first of these is that you can write your own meta description. As I covered yesterday, this is like your subheading and should be written with a lot of copywriting attention. It doesn’t appear to impart much SEO value, but nonetheless it’s worth taking some care to get this as good as it can be. Remember, you have around 160 characters to get your message across so use them wisely!

The second feature is that you can insert your own meta keywords as well. This may or may not be a good thing – keywords metadata have been proven to be ignored by Google, and don’t appear to impart much weight in Yahoo! and Live. They have the further disadvantage of telling your competition what the keywords are that you feel are important, which you probably don’t want to do!

Personally I think there’s more value in tags, not keywords, so I leave them blank. You may think differently!

A Summary

The post title is great to grab your reader’s attention. Make it catchy, and don’t worry about search engine ranking.

The page slug should be your most desired keyword or key phrase (but make sure you configure your permalinks first).

The page <title> element should be 60 characters of your very best SEO copywriting, and unique to that page.

Use the meta description value as your page subheading – it’s what shows up on the search results page just below your page title, and it needs to draw readers to your page.

Finally, to check that everything performs as it should - view your page source!