How we handle article titles and SEO

This page explains why we use both a long title and a short meta_title for each article, and how this helps both your readers and your search engine results.

Two kinds of titles

We keep two separate title fields for each article so we can optimize both reader experience and search engine results:

• Long title — the descriptive heading shown on the article page (for readers). This can be long and expressive.
• Meta title — a short (max ~60 characters) title used for the page <title> tag and OpenGraph metadata. This is what search engines and social previews typically show.

Why separate them?

Search engines prefer concise titles for display in results; long headings can be truncated and harm click-through rate. Keeping a short meta title ensures a good search snippet while the long title improves readability on the site.

How crawlers find the title

Crawlers visit the article URL and read the page HTML (including the <title> tag and OpenGraph tags). The sitemap only helps discover the URL and the last-modified time — it does not carry the display title used in search results.

What this site does

• Backend generates HTML with the <title> set to meta_title.
• The article page shows the long heading (the long title) to readers.
• The blog grid and article lists show the meta_title (fallback to long title if missing).
• The sitemap includes only URLs and lastmod (no titles), which is correct.

Quick guidance for content

• Provide a short, clear meta title (≤60 chars) focused on keywords.
• Use the long title to entice and describe the article on the page itself.
• Fill meta description for better search snippets.

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