A page title tag is one of the most important aspects of SEO.
By default, the title tag is generated automatically by WordPress to match the H1 heading of the page.
In this article, you’ll learn how to add a title tag in WordPress.
What is a Title Tag
Every HTML document, such as websites’ pages should contain a title tag to rank better in Google.
The title tag text tells search engine bots what the page or the article is about.
To make things easy, WordPress is automatically taking the page title (H1) and create it as the title tag.
How to find the title tag
Open any page of your website, right-click anywhere on the screen and click on ‘View Page Source’.
The title tag will be inside the head tag. Use CNTR+F or Command+F and search for <title>.
As you can see in the image above, the title tag text is our page title plus our website’s name.
<title>How to Add a Title Tag – Pluginizer</title>In most cases, this is great and can be left alone. In other cases, you may want to modify the text for Search Engine Optimization and in the next section, I will show you exactly how.
How to Add a Title Tag
We already checked above that our page includes a title tag. To edit it, we will need to follow these steps:
- Download an SEO plugin.
- Edit the desired page.
- Open the page source to verify the new title tag.
Let’s start with the first step and download an SEO plugin for WordPress.
Step #1: Download an SEO plugin
There are many good SEO plugins for WordPress and in this article, I’ll show you how to use the top three: Yoast, All-in-one, and RankMath.
Most likely is that you already have one of the plugins above installed on your website.
If not, feel free to install any of them, here at PluignsForWP we’re using Yoast, but they are all great. To prevent conflicts between the plugins, make sure that only one of the plugins above is installed and not all of them.
First, navigate to Plugins -> Add New and search for SEO.
The first three results are the plugins that we are going to cover in this tutorial.
Install and activate your desired one.
After activating the chosen plugin, we can move forward.
Step #2: Edit the desired page
It does not matter which of the three you decided to use.
In any case, we will need to open the edit screen of the page with the title tag that you would like to change.
Navigate to Pages -> All Pages and click on Edit of the page that you would like to modify.
After opening the edit screen, let’s move to the last step and add the title tag.
Step #3: Edit the title tag
In this step, follow the instructions that are related to the plugin you chose.
Yoast
Scroll down the page to the Yoast SEO box and look for the SEO title field.
We can see in the image below that our title is automatically assembled by a few variables: title page, separator, and site name.
To modify that, delete all or some of the variables and enter your custom text instead.
When done, click on update and move on to the next step.
All in one SEO
Scroll down to the AIOSEO box and into the Page Title field.
Just like above, this title is also generated automatically by variables.
To change it, delete the variables, enter your own text, and click update.
Rank Math
Click on the score button from the top right corner of the page to open the Rank Math sidebar.
Click on the ‘Edit Snippet’ button below the General tab.
Inside the popup, you’ll see that just like the other plugins, the title tag here is also generated by variables.
Replace the existing text with your custom one and close the popup.
Then, update the page and move on to verify.
Step 4: Verify the new title tag
After we changed the title tag, let’s just make sure that the new text is displayed by inspecting the page source once again as we did above.
Here when looking for the new title tag, we can see that it’s showing the custom text that we chose.
Feel free to keep improving your page and also add a meta description as well.
Conclusion
In this article, you learned how to add a title tag to your website by using the most popular SEO plugins.
Having a custom title text can be the difference between ranking high or not at all.
If you’re using a different one than the three above, let us know which one is that, and we will add it to the list.
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