How To Show Different Post Titles To Readers And Search Engines

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Show Different Post Titles To Readers And Search Engines
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As bloggers, when we write a post, we write a catchy title in the hope that it increases the CTR (because readers love to click on things with catchy titles).

But one problem with this approach is if you optimize your post title for readers, you miss out on one of the most important aspects of post titles: Search Engine Optimization (aka SEO).

I have talked a lot about the importance of keyword researchhow to perform keyword research and tools you can use for keyword research. Once we have our target keyword(s) in hand, it’s time to write some high-quality content keeping both – readers and search engines – in mind.

Our target is to write content which is reader-oriented, but also search engine friendly. We should apply basic on-page optimization techniques, and use plugins like SEO Writing assistant.

One Title For Readers, One Title For Search Engines

Suppose you write this post title:

“Make Money Online with Infolinks”

Competition in search engines is very high for this title because it contains the words, “make money online”.

But you can optimize this title to make it rank higher on search engines by keeping it about Infolinks (our main keyword).

So now we have two titles:

  • User-friendly post title: Make Money Online with Infolinks
  • Search engine friendly title: Infolinks: In-text Advertisement Program (Review)

And how do we create these two titles?

Optimizing Post Title for Both SEO and Readers in WordPress

Most of the WordPress SEO plugins like SEO by Yoast, All In One SEO, the inbuilt SEO features of offering you the option to write a different title for search engines (technically called a “meta title”).

Here’s the difference between a meta title and a post title:

meta title vs Post title
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If you are using WordPress as your blogging platform, head over to this post:

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Now, whenever you write an article, after writing the user-friendly title, go down to the end of the page to the SEO section.

Add in your “SEO title”, which is what will be displayed on search engines. Also, don’t forget to add a unique meta description in 158 characters to make your post even more search engine friendly.

I recommend you read this post which talks about how to make your blog post targeted for certain keywords.

Make it a habit to optimize your blog post for both readers and search engines. This will help you rank better and increase your readership.

When you write a meta title for search engines, always keep CTR in mind. A catchy post title will help you get a better CTR, and search engines follow click patterns to judge the quality of a page. This will ultimately help you rank higher.

For more SEO tips, refer to the following articles:

If you have any other questions related to creating meta titles, let me know in the comments and I’ll be happy to answer your query.

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Authored By
A Blogger, Author and a speaker! Harsh Agrawal is recognized as a leader in digital marketing and FinTech space. Fountainhead of ShoutMeLoud, and a Speaker at ASW, Hero Mindmine, Inorbit, IBM, India blockchain summit. Also, an award-winning blogger.

29 thoughts on “How To Show Different Post Titles To Readers And Search Engines”

  1. mohsin

    yes the method of meta title and post title help me alot to improve my result in search engine

  2. Emenike Emmanuel

    Hi Harsh,

    I have been seeing this but never really cared to change it. Just now I saw NicheHack use that and I was confused so I decided to make a search that landed me on your blog.

    But my question is, won’t Google penalize my blog for this?

    Thanks.

    1. Harsh Agrawal

      @Emenike
      No penalty for this.

  3. Joshua Allen

    We have a client using magento.

    It’s been tricky trying to explain seo titles vs normal page titles to the devs for magento. They aren’t familiar with wp.

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