SEO Optimization With Titles & Taglines

When using a CMS like WordPress, selecting a strong tagline can mean a huge difference in your Search Engine rankings. That is, with a couple of useful tagline SEO tips you can easily get not only better rankings, but higher click through rates. Which means more visitors from search engines.

Try out my SEO tagline recommendations that I give you at the end of this post. They are easy to implement, and can give an initial boost to your rankings, especially if your site is brand new.

Also watch my video explanation below on WordPress tagline SEO recommendations.

Exactly, What Is A Tagline?

When speaking about websites, a tagline can usually mean two things:

A general setting in you site, that “In a few words, explain(s) what this site is about.“

If you use WordPress, you can set your tagline under Settings » General.“A small amount of text which serves to clarify” (source: Wikipedia) what the site is about.

This tagline is usually displayed in or under your header or logo.

These 2 different taglines are of course closely related, both describing your site in a few words. They don’t even necessarily need to be different.

What Do These Taglines Have To Do With SEO?

Actually both of these taglines have to do a lot with SEO. There are 2 main reasons:

A default setting for most WordPress sites is to use your tagline #1 (above) in your homepage’s title. Title being one of the key elements of SEO, look what you get if you forget to change the default tagline “Just another WordPress site“:

At the time of writing this post Google returned way over 9 million pages, with the exact phrase “Just another WordPress site” in their title, only a few of them being actually a tip on how to fix this problem.

This makes no good for these sites’ SEO at all. It hurts their rankings but it’s also bad to their click through rates in the SERPs.

See more on this topic in my WordPress SEO Tips article.

In some cases it includes a link to your homepage, or it might have an html h tag (e.g. h1..h3). In both cases, this will make this headline way more important for search engines that usual text.

By the way, this tagline is what most of your readers will actually see and read on your site first. So you really want to put here something that is appealing, catches people’s attention, and clarifies in an instant where the visitor has just landed.

Tips On Good Taglines For SEO

Here are some tips that you might find useful when it comes to setting up your taglines:

• When starting a new site, just list you main keywords (i.e. your most important keyword for your homepage) in your tagline, separated with a comma. This will make sure Google understands better what your site is about, and also visitors will be more likely to click on your site from the SERPs. No need for fancy copy here.
• Use text in your header tagline instead of a picture, if possible. If you must use your logo with your headline, then make sure you copy the tagline text into your logo’s alt tag. You might consider using your tagline text as a title for your logo.
• For more advanced WordPress users, you can make your homepage title totally independent from your tagline. The easiest way to do it is to use a good SEO plugin (I recommend YOAST) and set your homepage title individually.