Title tags are one of the most important aspects of on-page SEO. It’s important to add the perfect SEO-optimized title for your blog post or anything else you will rank for.
We know that title tags are the first storyteller of any long-form or short-form content. When google shows a result in a search, the first thing the readers sees is your title, the meta description (mostly avoided by several readers), and then your content if they click on you.
So, it’s important to add the title tag and change or update it timely on your website.
Today, in this article, I am going to show you what title tags are; first then, how to change title tags in WordPress using two methods which are using appearance and Yoast SEO, and then the importance of using title tags or updating them time by time.
What Are Title Tags?
Title tags are a particular type of meta tag that appears in the search results as an h1 tag and appears in the browser head. Title tags are the most effective place to add keywords per your needs.
According to a Search engine journal,” On its own, the title tag has little impact on organic rankings”.
Obviously, not a single ranking factor plays a significant role in ranking. After Meeting almost all of the quality ranking factors, including E-A-T and all other things, your web page will rank in SERPs.
That, without optimizing the title tag, you can’t just rank. Title tags give search engines a brief about what’s on the page; this is where search engines analyze keywords at first before analyzing the entire body content.
How Do I Change My Title Tag In WordPress?
Generally, there are two methods through which you can change the title tag on your WordPress site.
One uses your WordPress dashboard, and the other uses an SEO plugin called Yoast SEO, one of the most popular and easy-to-use SEO plugins that help us make critical SEO changes simply with just a few clicks. I will tell you a few more methods that are also easy, but first, let’s know about these two.
To do it with your WordPress dashboard, you need to know where you change the title tag or where is the title tag in WordPress.
Usually, you can go to appearance, then customize, then site identity, and that’s it, the title of your website. As I have said, you can do it with your yoast plugin. I will discuss it in the next few sections.
Using Appearance
To change the title of your home page, you need to follow these steps:
Login to your WordPress dashboard
Go to the appearance section
Go to customize
Go to site identity
Then choose your title
Click Publish
Using Yoast SEO
To change the site title of your home page using Yoast SEO, you can follow the below steps:
Install the plugin from your WordPress dashboard
Activate Yoast SEO
Now go to the Yoast SEO section
Now to Settings
Now go to site basics
Now you can change your site title
Changing A Title Tag For A Post
The site title is not that effective. If you have opened the blog, your homepage ranking for a keyword on the top position will only help you to get 2 or 3 clicks on your blog.
The success of your blog will mostly depend on the title you fix, but that is the blog post title, not the site title.
Here’s the way you can change or update your blog post titles:
Login to your WordPress dashboard
Open up a new post or create a new post
At the top, you can find your post title. If you have not set it up, it will be untitled. You can add or change or update it now. (Check my full guide about how to add titles in WordPress, where I have discussed a lot of different things to consider when writing perfect titles for your blog as well)
Why Is It Important Use A Title Tag In WordPress?
Before knowing why it is important, you need to know that titles and title tags are different.
Title tags are the meta tags that give an idea to Google what the page is about. Optimizing keywords into this can make it very obvious to get you on-page SEO perfectly.
On the other hand, titles are also called h1 tags, which are part of the exact content when title tags are not part of the body or content.
The browser also shows the title tags in the heading, which means tab headings. When a proper title tag is not present on a specific page, then google and other search engines and browsers pick up the h1 tag of your page content to fill in the blanks of title tags. But, it’s highly recommended to use a proper SEO-optimized title tag for each page to get proper rankings.
Now, let’s come to the point: why is it important to have a title tag or update the title as time passes?
To Rank On Google
As I have said before, Google always looks out for what the content is about using the title tags of the page and the h1 tag of the page.
And as Google looks at it first before reading other page content, optimizing this area with your target keywords can make it great to rank for your target keyword on google.
Title tags help you make your content more attractive and engaging but still easy to rank.
Let’s say you have written content with an h1, like “How to cook engaging chicken fry”, and your target keyword is “Delicious chicken fry recipe”. If you force yourself to place the keyword in your h1, it would not be that engaging.
To do this, you can use a separate title tag: "Delicious chicken fry recipe: How to cook them?”. That’s it. And also I personally use separators in the titles where I can't put in the separate title tag to make my title tag more attractive and easy-to-scan that gets the most clicks in SERPs. (You can check out my full guide about how to add title tag separators in WordPress)
To Show Readers Your Responsibility
Sometimes, when you have written a theoretical article two or three years ago and mentioned it in your title and h1 tag, readers will think that this is old and they should not click on it.
And the main problem is that you have also entered the year of publishing there because that would get more clicks because, in that year, the article was fresh.
To avoid this misunderstanding, you can update your title’s year with the current ongoing times. And to avoid some unwanted problems from google, you can update a few lines of the content of your website to get it ok.
Another relevant thing is when you are updating your title, try to use separators. Several separators help us separate the main topic, keyword, and site identity. You might be thinking that why is it important? In one of my articles, I discussed how to add title tag separators in WordPress and all the other things. You can go and check that out.
Here’s it, you know how to change the site title and the post tiles to make your blog grow quickly and have more clicks.
Conclusion
In conclusion, title tags are the on-page element that carries the most weight for SEO, as google gets a brief of the content and searches for your target keywords here.
And second of all, optimizing titles or updating them regularly is super crucial as this helps readers decide whether or not they should click on your content in the SERPs where thousands of competing content titles are just in front of their eyes.
In this article, I have discussed how to set up or change the blog title in two different ways: how to change the post title, why it is important to do all these kinds of things, and ultimately, what title tags are. Thanks for reading.
