After choosing that perfect domain name it doesn’t just stop there.
You need to think about a site title and tagline.
So first, let’s find out what site titles and taglines can do for your site.
Table of Contents
The Purpose of Site Titles and Taglines
Both of these will appear on each and every post and page of your site, usually in the header.
And both of these will be the first thing users see and it will tell them what your site is about and what they can expect from viewing it.
A site title and tagline are two different things.
Taglines and site titles help with SEO, provided they are both optimized for it.
Optimizing them both for SEO, helps bots to understand what your site and content are about.
Every page of your site is crawled by bots and bots crawl your site to understand it.
The first thing that bots crawl is the header, where your site title and tagline are.
Adding your main keywords to both is letting users and search engines know that that page is relevant to what they are looking for.
Site titles and tag lines are not mandatory but they do affect SEO, and we all know what a big deal SEO is, so it’s really a good idea to have them.
Site Titles
A site title is usually the name of your site or it could be your company name, or your name.
Or it could also be used as another way to tell visitors what your site is about with a brief description, but it’s usually the name of your blog/site.
The site title will also appear in the top left corner of the WordPress dashboard as the site name.
And it’s up to you, if you choose to have a site title or not.
But search engines do display your site tile in search results, making it important for SEO.
And it can be changed at any time in WordPress and it won’t affect anything.
How Do You Come Up With a Site Title?
If your not using any type of name and you’re going with a brief short description whether your displaying it or not, then your site title should be what your site is about, in a few short strong keywords.
Describe your WHAT.
Taglines
A tagline is a catchy title or phrase, think of commercials.
It tells users what your site is about by letting users know what they can expect.
For example, if you have a site and your domain name is your name, no one would know what it’s about.
But having a tagline that explains in a few words what kind of content you have, helps users and search engines.
So, your tagline should be optimized for SEO using your main keywords.
If you choose to display your tagline it will only show up on your homepage is search results.
How Do You Come Up With a Tagline?
Keep it short and to the point.
What is the purpose of your site?
Use strong keywords that describe what you’re doing.
- It is a health food blog? Eating Healthy One Meal at a Time
- Or a crafts blog: Building Block Crafts for Kids
- Maybe a gardening blog: Growing Tropical Plants in Pots
Short, Easy, Fast.
And just like your site title you can change your tagline anytime you want and it will not affect anything other than if you already had your logo created around it.
And your tagline description could be used in place of your logo.
Examples of Site Titles and Taglines Together
Let’s just say:
The domain name is a person’s name: jzjingle.com
The site title could be: J. Z. Jingle or Living Financially Free, Pennies to Dollars, Investing in Your Future
The tagline could be: learn to live debt-free, start early living a debt free life, the road to living debt-free, living debt-free and so on
With a person’s name as a domain name, you don’t know what the site is about, but with site title example #2, there was an introduction that somewhere in there, there would be talk of money, and then a tagline that said “hey I’m about living debt-free now and or in the future.
One more:
Domain name: writingwithapurpose.com
Site Title: Writing With a Purpose or Content Creating for Business Owners
Tagline: Creating Content That Showcases Your Personality
Another way, you can think of it is; what are you called, what do you do and how are you going to do it?
What am I called? – let’s do this blog thing
What do I do? – help new bloggers learn to blog
How am I going to do it? – by talking about all things blogging
Adding Site Titles and Taglines
There are a couple of ways to get to the site title and tagline boxes.
- The first way is through the WordPress dashboard, go to Settings/General.
When you go through Settings/General and you enter a site title, it will appear exactly how you enter it in the top left corner.
If you choose to leave the site title bar blank, your dot com name will be used.
- Another way is to click on Appearance/Customize in the WordPress Dashboard.
- And another way, is by clicking on your site name to visit site, then clicking Customize.
These last two ways will take you through your Theme to Customize.
Once in your theme, you will find it in the Header Builder tab.
How to Hide Site Titles and Taglines in WordPress Without Using CCS
CCS stands for cascading style sheets and it’s a style language used to customize the appearance and layout of a site.
Every WordPress theme contains an “Additional CSS” tab.
And it’s pretty simple to use, if you know what your needing to add or change and how to do it with style codes.
But we’re not using it, we’re going to do it without using CSS.
Earlier I mentioned that site titles and taglines were not mandatory and it was your decision to use them or not.
For example, you may have had a logo created with everything you need and all that extra would look tacky.
But you can still have them on the backend of WordPress where bots crawl without them being seen by users.
- Go to Appearance/Customize or Visit Site/Customize
- In the left hand side bar find Site Identity and click on it
- Site Identity page will open and click on Site Title and Logo Settings.
- Scroll down and you will see the Display Site Title and Tagline toggle buttons.
- Click on the toggle buttons to open site title and tagline boxes.
- Enter your site title and tagline.
- Then turn off the display buttons so that they are no longer activated.
- Scroll up to the top and click publish.
- Exit out and refresh your page, clear your cache and go back to your WordPress dashboard and you will see that what you entered in Site Identity is showing in the Settings/General site title and tagline boxes, but not showing on your site.
Go back to your Site Identity Page, just to make sure everything is good and your site title and tagline are still there.
Now when bots crawl your site they will find this.
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Trouble Shooting Site Identity
If it didn’t work, start over and
- AFTER you enter your site title and tagline.
- Go up top and click publish.
- Then scroll back down and deactivate the display buttons.
- Then scroll back up and click publish again.
And now you can exit out.
Recap on Site Titles and Taglines
- Site titles and taglines do affect SEO and optimization for your site is very important.
- Keep them short and sweet using your main keywords, telling your visitors exactly what the purpose of your site is.
- Some sites have their domain name logo and use the blocks for their site title and tagline in case they ever want to change it.