What Are The Differences Between H1 Headings And SEO Titles? NYC SEO Services Help Explain!
Writers like putting serious thought into their titles. That’s smart, considering that titles for online content are crucial to both search engines and human readers. That makes titles twice as critical! If you use our NYC SEO services plugins in conjunction with WordPress, then you can insert the post title into the corresponding input field. Your title then appears as its own H1 heading atop your post. However, there are opportunities to improve and edit your SEO title separately. Why is this? What is the actual difference? Also, how ought you best edit SEO titles? This post is an explanation about all this.
A Pair of Input Fields
Some of you are going to find this obvious, but let’s still look at just where you can find the post title input fields. It’s the same for the SEO title as it is the H1 heading. The input field for the post title is found at the top of the post editor or page in WordPress.
The SEO title input field is in the plugin metabox, and that’s under the post input field. If you want to edit your SEO title, then you have to click on the button for ‘edit snippet’. Then, the snippet preview opens. You get three input fields from the snippet preview. The first is an input field letting you edit your SEO title. Underneath this input field, you should see a green bar. By ‘should’, I mean the bar is going to be green should your SEO title prove well-optimized. It could be red or orange instead; if so, put some work into enhancing or improving it. As are aware, your SEO title has a bunch of strange % signs or symbols in it. Don’t be afraid of this, as I’ll explain it further in the post.
The Purpose of the SEO Title and the Post Title
It’s essential to understand that your SEO title actually doesn’t have quite the same purpose as your page or post title. The post title is intended for folks who are already visiting your site. It’s letting them know what your page or post is all about. However, your SEO title is intended for someone that’s not actually yet on your website. It’s shown to those who are still on the search engine results pages. It’s the title for your Google snippet; this is why it is in your snippet preview. Your SEO title’s purpose is making search engine users click on that snippet, visit your website, and then buy your product or service or just read your content.
What is that these plugins do automatically? Without doing a thing, this plugin can generate SEO titles simply based on the H1 heading, your post title. It will also incorporate the name of your site into the SEO title. If you don’t actually put the name of your site into your SEO title, then Google’s going to take this step for you. Such plugins ensure your title doesn’t wind up too long, as you’ll receive a notice if it is.
You can actually set how you want your SEO title generated in the plugin’s titles and meta section. When you do that, then all of your post titles are generated in identical fashion. However, as mentioned previously, you can still edit an SEO title separately when it’s for a post. Next, I’ll go over instances where you might wish to do so.
Is editing your SEO title something you should do? Personally, I would never edit a separate post’s SEO title. I like to write out a post and then pick a title that’s suitable for visitors already on the site as much as for search engine snippets drawing in new readers. There are setting for automatically generating titles in almost all plugin installs, and they are trustworthy.
If I decide to adapt a title, it might be simply because I neglected to emphasize a focus keyword in the post title. It’s easy enough to alter the post title after the fact. The SEO title then changes right along with that. That works fine for a post like this. On the other hand, if you’re trying to sell something, then your page or post title might not be the actual best SEO title. You might want to drop a price mention in the SEO title, but you’d like to leave it off the page H1. In such cases, you need to edit your SEO title.
Just how can you actually edit the SEO title? It’s a fair enough question. An even better question is just what those strange %% signs are doing in the input field? Can you even use those?
The SEO Title Template
As previously described, such plugins can generate SEO titles for you automatically. This title template is something you can adapt to your own preferences for both the titles and also the meta section of your own plugin. This is what those weird %% signs are all about. At our NYC SEO services, we call the signs ‘magic variables’. It might not be actually magic, but what these variables do is take particular snippets of information and then assemble them into an SEO title. So, you should see a page or post title appear if you type “title” into the SEO template input field. If you use the “sep”, it should take your chose separator sign, such as the small bullet used by us, and then put it into the SEO title.
For more inside tips on search engine optimization, visit our blog. For any immediate questions, please feel free to call us or contact us today!
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