HTML Title Tags Done Right
Probably the most frustrating patterns is when all of the pages on a site use the same title tag contents — usually the site’s name. It is not very frequently that you will see this, however sites built with frames usually exhibit this behavior. Imagine if this page’s title was iMarc. That would be awesome.
Second on the list is sites that don’t include the site name in the title. You’ll see pages with Contact Us and About. It gets real interesting when you have multiple tabs open with pages like that. Which About is the one I’m looking for again?
The most common mistake after sites get past the first two obstacles is incorrectly ordering the title. The most specific information in the title should be first. This matters much more once a user has drilled down into a site. Imagine a title like Example Site - About - Employees - John Smith. Most browsers will display the following in the tab: Example Site - About - Empol.... Which employee am I looking at again?
Here is the above example corrected, with most specific information to least: John Smith - Employees - About - Example Site. Browser tabs would tend to show John Smith - Employees - Abo.... Now I can figure out what tab I wanted to click on. I love it!
In closing, if you want to kick up the usability of your site when being viewed in a tabbed browser, be sure to add a favicon. Dan Cederholm will love it.
Comments
Problem: Title tags that are good for tabs are bad for bookmarks. Looking at a list of bookmarks, I want to see the arrangement "General - Topic - Specific".
@Rob
Well, when you bookmark you can change it. Unfortunately you can't change the tab titles. Plus, the percentage of pages you bookmark is tiny compared to the number of pages you view a day.
I don't know exactly how you use bookmarked pages, but I tend to throw them into my delicious account in case I want to check them out later. I can usually identify what I am looking at by the most specific piece of information, whereas putting the least specific first would require me to read the rest of the title.
For instance, if I were to bookmark this page, I would see HTML Title Tags... and instantly know what I was looking at. If we put Communiqué [iMarc] first I would need to scan past that to figure out if it is what I was looking for.
I guess it comes down to the fact that I believe most people will be able to identify information via specifics more frequently than needing categorization info.
Though it's implied with the rule "the most specific information in the title should be first", the home page should start with the company name:
"iMarc - Web design solutions" is better than "Web design solutions - iMarc". Even though the latter is supposedly more search engine friendly.
I was surprised to find this post discussing the Title Tag's impact on human interaction. I didn't think we were worried about those pesky human beings anymore. Don't we just do whatever the Google Gurus promise us will positively influence our rankings on SERPs?
I mean, SEOmoz doesn't mention anything about bookmarking in its Best Practices for Title Tags.
Read something more recent.
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Visitors
Having a nice structured title tag is also nice for bookmarking.
Bookmarks use the page's title as their title, so having 'About Us' bookmarks isn't terribly useful. Having to edit the bookmark manually is pretty annoying so it's nice to see when a site gets their title tag right.