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Guest Article

The Importance of the Title Element

By Kynn Bartlett

The TITLE element for a web page is one of the most important bits of microcontent you can write, because it's how your page will be abstracted to the world.

Search engines will list the page's TITLE when displaying results; bookmarks will use the TITLE as the default name of the link.Other automated lists of pages, such as site indexes, will often use the TITLE. And, of course, most browsers will use the TITLE as both the name of the the window when rendering the page, and the name of the page in history functions.

TITLE is the first and most important piece of metadata for a page; web indices routinely give higher value to TITLE values than to META tags such as "description" or "keywords." Having a useful TITLE for each page is extremely important.

Here's some dos and don'ts regarding TITLEs:

DO include the name of your company or organization in the page TITLE.
DON'T put it first -- put the unique content of the page first.

GOOD: <TITLE>Online Classes -- The HTML Writers Guild</TITLE>

BAD: <TITLE>The HTML Writers Guild -- Online Classes</TITLE>

This is bad because in many cases your page's TITLE may be truncated, and if you've got 10 links all labeled "The HTML Write...", it's very hard to find information!

DO include relevant information about what's on the page.
DON'T make it just a string of keywords -- that's what the "keywords" META tag is for
DO be sure to check your page TITLE carefully; often you may be working from a template and you may forget to update the TITLE.
DON'T try to include markup within your TITLE; you can't include italics or bold or line breaks in a TITLE, although you can use character entities such as those to create the < (<) or & (&).
DO use a minimum number of words, since you have limited space available; cut out words like "welcome" (as has been suggested), and other "stop words" that are simply too common.
DON'T cut out so much as to make it just a string of words with no connection, though; have enough structure to the TITLE that it makes sense at a glance and isn't just a collection of unrelated keywords.
DO make sure that the TITLE is a good headline for your page.
DON'T necessarily copy the first H1 into the TITLE, although this may not be a bad idea; often I compose the TITLE from the first H1 and the first H2, because I typically use secondary titles on most of my pages.

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