You might sometimes feel that one of your blog posts needs to have a title despite not being so search engine optimized.
You want your readers to read the headline you wrote, but you might wish to search engines to see others optimized for better visibility and click-through rate.
While WordPress gives you no option for doing that, you can follow this step-by-step tutorial to do this easily. Let’s first discuss the steps involved, and then I’ll show you how this can help in better search rankings and SEO.
Below are the steps you need to follow to show different titles to search engine and users
Step 1 Install The WordPress SEO Plugin
I would recommend you go with Yoast SEO as you can easily handle whatever you need regarding indexing your site, search appearance, link redirection, taxonomies, and more for free. I recommend it because I use it here.
Alternatively, any WordPress SEO plugin will work the same way, so it’s up to you.
Configure the basic SEO settings through your plugin, and move to the next step.
Step 2 Create or Edit a New Post
Now go to your WordPress post editor and scroll down until you find the SEO meta box. Depending on the plugin you’ve chosen, they will be somewhere below the post editor.
In this meta box, you can see your posts’ default title that you wrote in the WordPress heading field. To edit this, you have to click on the title, and a new box will open. This is where you will enter the new title you want to show in SERPs.
That’s it.
Publish your post, and search engines will now look for the title you provided in the meta title box.
It will take some time depending on your website’s crawl rate, so in the meantime, you can check the different titles by visiting your post on your browser by hovering your mouse on the tab head.
An example below:
For Non-WordPress Users
In case you don’t use WordPress and use your own HTML-based website, you can still do it. Below is the code you can use to do so. Just remember to put it immediately after the <head> tag in your posts:
<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1” /><title>Enter the title here</title> |
You can use the above code in your blog posts and pages.
The Benefits of Showing Different Titles to Real Visitors & In SERPs
The RankBrain, an A.I. Google uses to better reshape its algorithm based on data, makes several things necessary to rank higher.
Click-through rates being one of them can be enhanced using this technique.
Let’s say a series of posts where you mention part 1 of 3, and so on, then this little step can seriously help you with your on-page SEO.
Moreover, you can also use this same technique to free up some character space and make your headline fit into the SERPs.
Simply remove the separator and blog name from the meta title the same way we removed the whole title. By doing so, you can keep your title within the limit of 60 characters (to be shown without an ellipsis in SERPs) even if it exceeds your post.
This will also help you better inform your users without losing organic rankings.
I hope this tutorial was helpful for you, and you now know how to show different titles to users and search engines.
Share this post with your friends and leave a comment below to let me know how it helped you.
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