How To Show Different Post Titles To Readers And Search Engines

As bloggers, when we write a blog post, we tend to write a catchy title so that it will increase the CTR (because readers love to click on things with catchy titles).
But one problem with this approach is that 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 research, and how 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 that keeps 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 SEOpressor.

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 SEO 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, Platinum SEO, All In One SEO, the inbuilt SEO features of Thesis (…and many others) offer 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:

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 in 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:

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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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