The WordPress title tag feature plays a vital role in a site’s user experience and search performance. It’s also called the WordPress SEO title tag. Here’s how to customize them.
But, before going to the tutorial part of how to add a title tag in WordPress, why not shed some light on the core concept? This will help us feel the importance of having titles in their perfect shape.
What is a WordPress title tag?
The WordPress title tag is a feature that works in association with the website theme. It was first introduced with WordPress 4.1. The WordPress title tag feature allows a WordPress theme to add a document title tag to its HTML <head> for pages.
Usually, for a WordPress post or page, the <h1> tag is used as the <title> meta tag. When you create a post, the post title you set there is the default <title> tag for that post on the front-end.
But what about the homepage? WordPress has dedicated settings options to add a meta title tag for your site’s home page. This also works for the other archive pages.
The title tag is used to describe a page in brief. It can be visible on the page’s front-end view. For a post, it could be the post title (if not set a different one using an SEO plugin).
It also appears on the search engine result pages as the snippet title with meta descriptions. Also, you can see it as the tab description while visiting on a browser.
Why are the WordPress title tags so important?
Title tags are important for 2 obvious reasons. First, they tell the visitors about the page they are visiting. By seeing the title tag content, a user can understand the purpose of that page.
If you think about the title of a blog post, you can relate. We can get a quick idea about a blog post from its title. The same applies to any web page you can imagine.
Again, the title tag is crucial for a page’s SEO performance. Search engine crawlers get valuable data on web pages from their titles. The search result pages also display the titles defined by the <title> tags.
A thoughtfully crafted title tag will give a clear impression of the inner content of a web page. A strong title tag can increase your CTR on search engine result pages.
A better CTR will also improve your search ranking. So it’s all related! And this is why you must create effective titles for your posts and pages.
Why should you customize a WordPress title tag?
The significance of the title tags is as clear as daylight. Now, the question is, why should we customize them? For posts and pages, a WordPress title tag is automatically generated from the headline. It’s already there! Why should we change them?
Well, sometimes, the post/page headlines can be longer than the recommended titles by search engines. In that case, the title on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) for your post could look incomplete.
If a title on the SERP doesn’t make enough sense, the visitors may not visit that page at all!
Besides the length factor, you may want to put the focus keyword in a more prominent position in the title. This might not be obvious for a post/page headline (h1).
The same applies to search engine robots. A short and properly described title will increase your chance to rank better and gain improved ranking over time.
Now let’s jump into how to change meta tag titles in WordPress.
How to customize title tags in WordPress?
This section will also answer the query- how to add SEO title in WordPress. There are 3 major ways to customize or edit WordPress tag titles.
- From the General Settings panel
- Using the Customizer
- With an SEO plugin
The first two methods allow us to edit the site’s main title and tagline. The site title can appear with other pages’ titles. The site title and the tagline will work as the default meta title for the homepage. With an SEO plugin, you can edit titles for the home and other pages.
Editing the WordPress title meta tag from general settings
This way, you can change your site’s name and tagline. Both of these are used as the title tag of your WordPress site’s homepage.
To set your awesome WordPress title tag for the homepage, first sign in to your WordPress dashboard. From the left side menu, open Settings → General.
On this page, you’ll get fields to enter the Site Title and Tagline. Usually, these data are entered while installing WordPress.
So you can edit your WordPress title tag from the general settings panel. The Site Title you set from here will be used in other places with the “Site title” variable. The tagline will be usually used on the homepage <title> along with the Site Title. Here’s the format: “Site Title – Tagline”.
👉 Bonus: How to Add Google Tag Manager to WordPress in 2 Steps
Modifying the WordPress title tag from Customizer
You can edit the Site Title and Tagline from another place- the Customizer. The WordPress General Settings and Customizer both let you edit the same Site Title and Tagline.
To do it from the Customize menu, go to WordPress Dashboard → Appearance → Customizer → Site Identity. You’ll get the same Site Title and Tagline fields.
Edit and publish the data from there.
Editing WordPress title meta tags using an SEO plugin
Using the above two methods, you could edit the main WordPress site’s name and tagline. Both of these are used to describe the homepage (or the site as a whole) by default. The site name is included in other page titles as well.
But you need to use an SEO plugin to customize the post/page <title>s. If you want to make a blog post title more optimized for SEO, it may need to be slightly different from the original article headline (h1). So how to do that? You can do it easily with the Yoast SEO plugin (or other similar plugins like WP Rocket).
While editing a post, you’ll get a Yoast SEO section at your editor’s bottom. Navigate to that panel. Click on the editing options and put the SEO title as you like. The suggested character limit is 60 for this.
This way, you can modify WordPress title tags for any post or page and achieve better results.
Wrapping up
So, this was all about customizing title tags in WordPress. Have you enjoyed this tutorial on how to change a title tag in WordPress? We believe you’ll be benefitted from editing your site title tags. Please share your thoughts on how to change page title tags in WordPress in the comments.
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