Do your Page Titles, Headlines and URLs Match?

Think back a few years ago, back to when websites were not run by Content Management Systems (CMS) platforms such as Blogger and WordPress. Did the page title, article title and HTML file name of the pages on your Web site all match? No, probably not. There are a couple possible reasons why they didn’t, but the most likely is that your web designer/creator was “lazy” and just plugged in what they thought made sense and was easy to code.

Fast forward a few years and now we are ALL lazy. The CMS tools have made it too easy for us to just plug in a post title and move on without a second thought to the page title or file name/URL. We know that WordPress will use our carefully crafted, keyword rich, attention grabbing text in all three places, and many are content to leave well enough alone. So what’s the big deal? We all know the importance of properly optimizing our page titles, but post titles (headlines) and URLs are also great places to insert your keywords – and all three do not have to match.

In this screen shot of a recent AG article,  we can see that the Page and Post titles are the same, but the URL has been modified.  Hooray!

While the specific affects of optimized URLs and post titles (H1s) is a never-ending debate among SEOs, most agree that in the big picture it is helpful to have them. Big picture is where long-term results are found.

If you are in a competitive market – like real estate – you need every ounce of help you can get. Take a few minutes and tweak your pages a bit, use alternate key words or phrases in each of the three places. Think about how people will be searching for your content. For example,  if you look carefully at this post, you’ll notice that while the page title, post title and URL are related (and therefore also relevant to the search engines), they are also somewhat varied – increasing the likelihood that it will rank well, and actually be clicked on.   A word of caution, page titles MUST be treated with respect, as they are among the most powerful places to put your keywords – put your best one(s) there and never, ever stuff them.

It does take a few extra clicks and a couple minutes to come up with good text to be used in titles and URLs, but do it well and additional traffic (and dollars in your pocket) will be your reward.