Good Web Page Titles

April 19, 2004 | 25 Comments

I’ve posted on the topic of using good titles quite a few times. I’m starting to feel a bit like Zack DeLaRocha, the king of repetition, but hey, if it works for him maybe it’ll work for me.

Proper titling of you Web pages is probably the easiest and best thing you can do to improve the usability of your Web site. So, I ask you, why do people insist on using clever and/or vague titles?

Let’s look at a few examples. I’m going to pick on a few people I really respect (sorry!), just because it’ll get my point across and I can show you exactly how clever titles can be hard on a reader, and maybe more importantly, a Web searcher.

Look at this title from Greg Storey’s Airbag, a wonderful blog with a killer design and great content — A Better Tighty Whitey.

Ok, what is that about?

I’d been to his site quite a few times, seen that title, and had no real interest in reading the post as I figured it had nothing to do with what I normally come to his site for. I mean, hell, Dunstan posted about underwear, why not Greg?

I was wrong. This is actually a very insightful article about document design. Had it not been explicitly pointed out to me, I’d have probably never read it. I’m pretty sure I’d have had a hard time finding it if I was searching for “document design.”

That’s cryin’ shame.

Here are a few more recent examples of clever or vague titles:

“The Problem, the Balloon, and the Four Bedroom House” from ALA
“Let Them Eat Cake” from ALA and “This cake is all frosting” from 37 Signals
“Sometimes, A House of Cards” from SimpleBits
“Not Dead” from Mezzoblue

Can you tell what any of these posts or articles are about simply by looking at the title?

Now you could argue that based on the fact that the authors (or publishers) are all highly respected and well known that this is just fine. But what about people coming in via a search? A good title is probably the most important thing you can do to help searchers find your stuff.

Let Them Eat Cake, for example, is about:

Using JavaScript and the DOM, we have the ability to control every element on a well-structured web page. Add a bit of CSS and we have the recipe for a wonderful experience regardless of the browser, platform or device being used.

I may be stating the obvious, but it doesn’t have a thing to do with cake. The thing is — Google doesn’t know that! and neither does anyone who is trying to find information via a search engine on the Web.

I was speaking with Peter Morville the other day and he brought up the idea that perhaps the most important thing in building successful Web sites is search engine optimization as so much of so many site’s traffic comes from via search engines.

I began to think about how I get information. Sure, I go and read A List Apart every week and bookmark those articles I particularly like, but what about those I don’t bookmark? What about when I need to find something I read a year ago? Something I know is about JavaScript, but I can’t remember where I saw it? Am I going to search for “cake” — of course not — I’m going to search for “JavaScript.”

Anyway, I’m not trying to take the fun out of Web pages titles, and I really hope the people I “picked on” won’t be offended. I’m just tired of not being able to find what I’m looking for.

A clear, descriptive title for your posts and articles is a very helpful, very good thing. It might not be fun and it might not be clever, but hey, it might help people find (and read) some great content, and that’s what it’s all about right?

Filed under: IA and Usability

Comments

1. JP said:

Yes, yes, yes, yes, YES!!!

The only one of your offenders* I might let slide is Dave Shea; I would argue that his post about CSS Zen Garden still being alive is not very important to the content-interested reader (especially since I read it after he had resolved the snafu), and if you had realized that the Zen Garden was down, you might have understood the post’s title at first glance.

*I respect these guys heaps, too.

Posted on April 19, 2004 04:18 PM | #

2. Bart N. said:

I often have 10+ tabs open in Firefox and it irritates me to no end when I can’t find the tab I’m looking for just because it doesn’t have a descriptive title. You’re also right when you say webpage titles are important for search engines. A good title ( with a few welchosen keywords ) can increase your search engine ranking substantially.

Posted on April 19, 2004 04:18 PM | #

3. seth said:

I couldn’t agree more.

Maybe if you _really_ want a clever title, you could use a subtitle. Like:

“A Better Tight Whitey - How To Improve White House Briefs”

I’m no content producer, but you catch my drift…

Posted on April 19, 2004 04:22 PM | #

4. Keith said:

JP – Yeah, I felt a bit bad about picking on those folks, but I figured my readers would be able to relate to my point a bit better that way.

It was by no means personal, and I’m sure they’ll understand.

Your very right that Dave’s was close, and in fact he usually does a good job, but it was one title that threw me off when I first saw it. That’s why I included it.

Posted on April 19, 2004 04:29 PM | #

5. Dave S. said:

Of course we’re not offended.

Generally I agree, but I think the odd clever post title outweighs any SEO benefits. A post title isn’t the fragile microcosm of SEO goodness you’re making it out to be; Google et. al will also index page content and highlight relevant snippets of the content itself. Clever wording may not end up being the most concise or even most relevant, but indexability vs. good writing is more or less a form vs. function debate. ;)

Aside: titles may be weighed higher, but given the way people are gaming PageRank these days, I wonder how much longer that will last.

Posted on April 19, 2004 04:45 PM | #

6. Greg said:

I’ll second all of what Dave wrote and add that as long as it’s for a personal site, I think clever titles are fine.

If I need descriptive titles, I’ll read a newspaper, a magazine, or a card catalog (do they make these anymore?).

Posted on April 19, 2004 05:18 PM | #

7. Joshua Porter said:

Keith, you’ve made a habit of pointing out things that could make all designers much better at what we do with little effort, but this is probably the most important point of them all. Excellent!

A related experience I had was when I changed the page links on the homepage of a site of mine. I had the links to the subsections of the site as paragraphs, but I changed them to headers instead, horribly ruining my visual design - I hadn’t updated the site in years. But, the simple return to what I was supposed to do worked.

My traffic tripled with that single change. Now the site ranks 2nd or 3rd in google when you type in “edwin arlington robinson” (a poet). I was wrong about my assumption that nobody reads him anymore…it’s more like you can’t read what search engines can’t find.

Posted on April 19, 2004 05:40 PM | #

8. Chris Vincent said:

That’s a good call in general, Keith. However, I’d like to point a few things out.

Let’s take the name of a blog. Passive Digressive. That says nothing at all about the blog itself; a better title would be “Chris Vincent on Web Design”, or something similar. However, that’s just no fun. ;)

Therefore, I always make sure that there’s a clearly marked-up description of the site with a respectably-high header (like H3).

The same could be said for Asterisk*, Mezzoblue, and the whole lot. Dunstan Orchard probably has the most descriptive title of all of us. :)

The same applies to articles. But, because they cite a specific topic that a user may be looking for, they need to be approached differently. For example, you could put use the cleverness as a kicker or a subheader, while putting the real topic first. For example, “Document Design: A Better Tighty Whitey”. You could reverse the order just as well. I notice that Scrivs does this to an extent on Whitespace.

And now, we repeat that great mantra that has been circulating for a month or so: “It’s all about trade-offs.”

Posted on April 19, 2004 05:55 PM | #

9. Alex said:

I really don’t believe that a title is that important. As long as the content is directly associated with the title, who cares? It doesn’t work out so great if you name your links with odd titles, but people figure stuff out eventually.

I usually agree with your arguments Keith, but on this one I’m gonna have to go the other way.

Posted on April 19, 2004 05:58 PM | #

10. Keith said:

Dave and Greg – if you pull out the personal site argument you’ve got me cornered. And you make a good point – Of course there can be a case made for injecting a little personality into the title and google will still pick up well written content.

But I still think this is a point that needs to be made. It goes beyond SEO. A good title can help your readers use your site. This is obviously more important in the business world.

The thing is, I do quite a bit of searching and the state of titles out there is horrible. All of the folks I picked on do a better job in that they at least have some kind of title.

Chris and Alex – Still not convinced? Type “web design blog” into Google.

Posted on April 19, 2004 06:20 PM | #

11. Scrivs said:

I reversed the order of my titles because they play a huge role in Google. You can say all you want that Google will index the content which it will, but the title is such an important factor that it cannot be overlooked.

If you are writing and could care less if someone finds the entry through Google then that is your perogative. However, if you want Google visitors then propers titles are a must.

I admit to not using good titles when I write my lil BS posts since there is nothing to search for. However, all posts at Forever Geeek have mostly proper titles and the amount of hits we receive from Google is unreal.

When it comes to content-code, the title is the first thing any search engine should see.

Posted on April 19, 2004 07:27 PM | #

12. Jim Rutherford said:

You are right on the money with creating better page titles to help search engines index your page. Just last week, I modified my Moveable Type blog, so that my sitename was not included in the title of all my archive pages. Now my archive page titles are the same as the name of the post.

This week I have already seen an additional 1200 unique page views - most of which are from search engines. While this may not seem like a lot hits to some of you, it represents an increase of 20%.

Posted on April 19, 2004 08:17 PM | #

13. caiuschen said:

I actually find it useful for commonly discussed topics to have obscure titles, if the title is memorable; and clever ones stand a decent chance. As people mentioned earlier, search engines seem pretty good at picking up well written content. For a topic like JavaScript, there’s a whole deluge of articles, but if I enter JavaScript and cake, the one I want is much more likely to pop up first.

Basically, the combination of unlikely keywords is sort of a unique identifier for me.

Posted on April 19, 2004 11:33 PM | #

14. Ian said:

One phrase: “Well said, Keith, Well said!”

Posted on April 19, 2004 11:58 PM | #

15. Chris Vincent said:

That’s a neat trick, Keith. ;)

Titles are of course important, particularly for search engines and screen readers. What I mean to point out is that, like Dave said, it’s sort of a form/function thing. But, as we know, the two can work together.

I have no argument against good, descriptive titles. The only kind of title I’m against goes something like this:

—===![_NAME_OF_THE_SITE_]!===—

Especially cruel are those damned DHTML animated titles. Very rare, of course.

At first I thought the topic was generally naming articles, rather than the title of the page in specific. My current templating system doesn’t allow me to mess with the page title, but well-named articles in their H3 tags don’t do bad on their own. Try Googling “css translucent backgrounds”, and you’ll see what I mean. ;)

Posted on April 20, 2004 12:08 AM | #

16. How said:

Good page titles are important when it comes to bookmarks, too.

Hope that’s not stating the obvious too much ;-)

Posted on April 20, 2004 12:55 AM | #

17. Simon Jessey said:

It all depends on the purpose of an entry. Most of the posts I make on the si-blog are really just to vent my spleen. They are not aimed at anyone in particular - I just like to write. Some of the posts might be important, however, and those entries are always given a more meaningful title.

In circumstances where I think the content of an entry is really important, I will make a special effort to make sure that the abstract in my RSS and Atom feeds is as descriptive as possible.

Of course, in most weblog formats each entry is contained within a category. That will always aid in the recovery of a post that has a vague title, I suppose.

Posted on April 20, 2004 05:14 AM | #

18. Rimantas said:

Oh, thanks Keith, Bart, Greg, Chris.

Some eye-openinig :)

I allways felt there is something wrong sometimes - and that was titles in the tabs and bookmarks…

Posted on April 20, 2004 06:22 AM | #

19. Andy Budd said:

It’s true that keyword rich titles are important in terms of SE ranking. However, well written titles play a much more important role than simply SE positioning. Most people scan read the titles when reviewing SE results. A site with a well written title that comes up in 5th or 6th place is much more likely to be clicked on than an esoteric title in the number one slot.

Posted on April 20, 2004 08:55 AM | #

20. Matt W said:

One other important thing about titles. In the first incarnation of my site, the “article” pages were titled the same as my main index. Google was picking up my articles OK, but clicking the search result would always bring the user to the main index, which may or may not have still had the article he/she was looking for. Once I fixed my titles, Google searches always went to the correct place, that being the 2nd level article page, and not the index.

Posted on April 20, 2004 09:45 AM | #

21. Bruce said:

How about this for an idea, albeit a rather silly one. One use of the ALA Let Them Eat Cake article could be to apply it to post titles:

A Better Tighty Whitey

becomes

Better White House Briefs (Document Design)

Then use DOM to display the title as the header with the more sensible header as a line of text below it. That way Google’s non-JS googlebot sees the sensible title whereas the reader sees the witty one.

Of course that’s probably quite disorientating, but nevertheless could be quite fun.

Posted on April 20, 2004 10:18 AM | #

22. oli said:

Great post! But why isn’t this page’s title “Asterisk; Good Web Page Titles”, or the Scrivs-style reversed version “Good Web Page Titles : Asterisk”? I think this makes bookmarks much easier to use, as I can often remember the page from the combo of site name and page title. Some examples are zlog: , Airbag - , and Web Graphics (who use the cut-down wg: ).

Not as useful for me are long site names plus title, eg “Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report:”. The length makes the pop-up bookmark menu huge, and the page title sometimes gets clipped. However this is still better than no site name at all imho.

Apart from that, spot on! Now, how about an article encouraging people to write real summaries for RSS feeds (rather than just clipping the first x words)?

Hehehe ;-) OK I’ll shut up now.

Posted on April 24, 2004 07:44 PM | #

23. oli said:

D’uh! Make that “* Good Web Page Titles” or “* - Good Web Page Titles”. It’ll match the favicon and everything.

Posted on April 24, 2004 09:11 PM | #

24. Steven Streight said:

You’re right back into that naughty word again: usability.

I actually use strange words in my posts, like tomato-frog, so I can find them again, when a blog site has a search engine. I just type in “tomato-frog” and I’m back in that post.

This is terrible, to have to resort to such tricks, due to poor web page titles or blog thread titles.

I love clever wordings, but titles should have clarity as the goal…perhaps a clever SUB-TITLE.

I sympathize with designers and content writers. It can get boring being so darned functional and usable and clear. I used to write bizarre short stories and experimental fiction in my spare time, due to being burnt out writing benefit-oriented direct marketing copy all day long at work.

Yet I insist, along with you Keith: users don’t have the time or patience to “figure it out.” They are offended when they must “play guessing games” or “struggle” with aspects of a web site. They are in a hurry. Get it? They don’t want to screw around with cleverness and cuteness and extreme experimentation and idiosyncracies that violate web norms and user expectations.

I surf the usability, designer, IA, HCI, UI, etc. web sites looking for Relevant Content, not clever titles of unknown articles.

I don’t care who the “genius” is behind the site, if I don’t quickly see Relevant Content, I’m gone…maybe never to return. I got way more books to read, web sites to analyze, web sites to explore, than I have time for. I wish there were 240 hours in each day, but nope. Only 24.

Posted on April 27, 2004 01:46 PM | #