 The Importance
of a Good Web Page Title
Many web designers
focus just on the actual look and feel of a page and
dismiss seemingly minor details like the page title.
However, a good title can, in just a few words, tell
your visitors what they can expect by reading your
page. More importantly, the page title is the only
way that many visitors will be able to identify and
find your page. A good title can therefore increase
the traffic to your site.
More and more
Internet users rely on search engines every day, and
search engines use page titles to generate the links
displayed after a search. Let’s suppose that you own
a company called The Attic, that specializes in
vintage clothing and you have just submitted your
website to a search engine. If the title of your page
is: “The Attic. Specializing in Vintage Clothing”,
it is OK. Certainly, it is better than just “Welcome
to the Attic”.
However, a better
option would be: “Vintage Clothing by The Attic”. The
reason is that, most likely, a visitor that comes to
your site from a search engine will not conduct a
search for “The Attic”, but probably will do it for
“Vintage Clothing”. The fact that those keywords are
in your title, and especially because they are at the
beginning, will increase the chance of the search
engine displaying your page within the search results,
and will increase the likelihood that the user will
notice the link and click on it.
An exception are
large companies with superb name brand recognition.
They may be better off by starting the page title with
the company or the brand name, since they will be well
known to most users and their purpose will be
evident. For all that matters, they may even not need
to rely on search engines for traffic at all.
Another reason to
pay close attention to the page title is that it is
used by web browsers to name the page when it is
bookmarked. If a user goes through her favorite files
and doesn’t recognize your page due to a lousy page
title, she may by-pass it, and, as a result, you will
waste a precious opportunity to get easy traffic to
your site.
In summary, you
want to use a page title that clearly states the
purpose of the page, that will catch the user’s eye
when it is displayed by a search engine, and that will
be easily identifiable by the user when he browses
through his files in the Favorites folders.
P.S. If you
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