As you write a post, it only takes a couple minutes to optimize the title tag, post title, and URL. The benefits are well worth it because you’ll rank for more keywords, get more search traffic, and improve your click through rate on the search engine results pages (SERPs) and the RSS readers.
Here are some things to consider. First, if you’re using WordPress, download the All in One SEO Plugin. This plugin lets you create a different title tag and post title for each of your posts. Normally, WordPress uses the same text for both elements but you want to be able to customize each element.
Title tags are the most important onpage SEO factor. Therefore, you want relevant keywords in this element. Also, Google uses the title tag as the title of the page on their SERPs. Google only shows the first 69 characters of the tag so you want to stay under that number to make your title easy to read.
Post titles are the titles used by RSS readers. Therefore, you want them to be catchy to entice your subscribers to click on your post. The post title doesn’t help much with your rankings so you don’t need to worry too much about including keywords. You don’t want your post titles to be too long since RSS readers have a character limit of what they will show. I think 50-60 characters is a good limit.
Another benefit to having different title tags and post titles is that you’re able to target more keywords.
Finally, we have URLs. For usability purposes, you don’t want your URLs to be excessively long. You can get a slight ranking benefit from keywords in the URL so make sure to include a couple of them.
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