Good practices : meta title and H1

[JorgeV]

Hello-

I was wondering what are the good practices with meta title and H1.

Is it good, okay, bad, to have use the same text for the meta title and the H1 of a page?

I know that the meta title is what visitors will see first, (in a search engine), and has a restricted length. So if a title is "long", a meta title should be refined, to be shorter and more direct.

However, if the meta title and H1 are different (but same meaning) , doesn't it look like an attempt of keywords over optimizing ?

[JesterMagic]

Most of my page title tags and h1 tags are the same since it is the title of the page and I usually do not repeat the h1 tag more than once.

[tangor]

Mine are the same ... after all it IS the title of the page.

YMMV

[nshep]

I have done both with great effect. In most cases, the meta title and H1 will be the same. However, sometimes it can make sense to have a different/longer title on your blog for click-through reasons or else. I have not seen any negative effect from that.

[skaterpunk]

Almost, always, the same.

If I end up with a really long title that gets too truncated with the character limits in SERP's, I'll make a slightly shorter title revision so that the keywords are all displayed.

P.S. While we're on the subject, I gave up on creating shorter url title's years ago. Eliminating stop words, and worrying about a shorter url title than the actual title, made no sense, as the url is not getting truncated.

[JorgeV]

Thank you for your replies.

[JesterMagic]

Actual I had forgotten about 1 case I had about a year ago. One of the few times that in the past 5 years where changing 1 thing on a page had a drastic change in the SERPS.

I have a really good page that had been high on page 1 for years. Media companies love to link to it. Then about 2 years ago it started to fall to about page 3-4. I had thought it was because of a negative SEO campaign. I kept updating the info on the page as needed but the ranking did not change (also did some disavows). About 1.5 years ago I switched the entire site to HTTPS and magically the page was back to the first page for a week and then it fell back to page 3. Then about a year ago I read about someone updating their h1 tags and title tag to be different from each other. I gave it a shot and updated the page and surprisingly it has worked, my page went from page 3 to 1 and has stayed that way. I didn't change the titles much. Basically something like "Red Widget Information" and "Information on Red Widgets".

I did try it on other pages I had which were on page 2-3 but didn't see much if any of a ranking jump (maybe 3 positions if I was lucky)

[lucy24]

Basically something like

In which direction? Seems like you'd want the <title> to be front-loaded, because users may only see the first couple of words (tabs, especially). The h1 can be back-loaded, because users see all the way to the end, which is the closest to the rest of the content.