12/21/2010
Yesterday John Gruber had an issue with poorly designed page titles. I'm with him 100% on that one, but I disagree with a couple of his points.
I agree that it's silly to load up your page title with SEO keywords. It's like people that hold on to meta tags. If the ONLY way you can think of to make your site more SEO friendly is with page titles, maybe you shouldn't be doing SEO.
The place where I think he oversimplified things are with the branding:
Fox News wants to let you know they've got fresh news on their home page:
FoxNews.com - Breaking News | Latest News | Current News
Who are these title-junk keywords aimed at? Google? Do you they really think that putting "breaking news" in their home page title makes it more likely that Google will rank them higher when people search for that term?
John even says "Fox wants you to know they've got fresh news on their home page". Maybe they want their readers to know that too:
I don't watch a lot of TV (haven't owned one myself since I was 12 when my brother and I saved up cans and bottles one summer for one), but I thought CNN was THE source for breaking news.
How many times will I need to read "FoxNews - Breaking News" before I realize that Fox is now the news site with breaking news? 10? 20? 100? Either way, every time I look at my tab bar I'm one reading closer.
Now I don't know anyone that works at Fox, so it's quite likely that they have these words there because of some misunderstanding of search engine optimization, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
If your company is trying to present an image to the world, I don't think you should squander your page title. Apple can get away with it, but what about HP. Does anyone know what business they're in these days. If they can summarize it in just 2 words the title bar can help them change perceptions pretty easily.
- HP - Printers
- HP - Computers
- HP - Enterprise Solutions
- HP - Still Relevant
Who are you and what are you doing?
OK, welcome back to Usability 101.
When talking about bookmarks the first thing to realize is there are many pages that will NEVER EVER be bookmarked. Think about it. Who's going to bookmark your privacy policy, or the thank you page of a form?
The next thing to realize is different people use bookmarks in different ways. We've been emailing this around the office all day and all the programmers agree that the page title should come before the site name. Everyone else thinks the opposite. Here's why:
If you're a programmer or a researcher you probably have a bunch of bookmarks that look like this:
- How to Retweet Using Yahoo Pipes - Gravity Switch
- Should your H1 tag be your Logo? - Gravity Switch
- Checklist of Proteins - World of Science
In this case you don't want the "source" cluttering up your bookmarks (of course from a branding point of view the "source" might want their name in there).
On the other hand, if you're a normal human (i.e. not a programmer) you probably have bookmarks that look like this:
- UMass - Financial Aid - Tuition
- Harvard - Admissions - Tuition
- Gravity Switch - Client List
- Gravity Switch - Directions
- NYC Transit: Forms: Contesting a Parking Ticket
For me (and probably John over at Daring Fireball who also said he prefers site name first) 95% of my bookmarks should be site name first. Derek is still ready to fight me to the end of the earth because in his world 90% of his bookmarks should have page title first.
I have 3 banks bookmarked. 2 of them start with the words "online banking" or "client login" or "account status". That's a pain for bookmarks, or for tab bars if I have 2 banks open at the same time (not uncommon if I'm doing banking stuff).
The truth is none of these would be horrible if reversed simply because as I said before most pages aren't bookmarked often, but it's probably worth raising your consciousness slightly as to why/how/if users will be bookmarking your site.
NOTE: Julie brought up a great point about search results. I the conclusion I'm coming up with is maybe the test about sitename first or last comes down to: When users search in Google for this information, would they type the site or company name in their search?
For instance:
If you're looking for ING Online Banking the title should be "ING Online Banking". If you're looking for "IE6 png hack" the site name should be last.