What Should the Title Bar Say?

I recently got an E-mail from a Lockergnome reader who wanted to ask about titles for Web sites. When push comes to shove, you might get a lot of different views on this, but I will share my own and leave the comments open to others to dispute anything I say. I am not a search engine expert nor do I play one on the Internet.

Here is what Matt had to ask.

Hi, love the Web Developer newsletter. I was wanting to know if you though it would be more important to put your page’s content title first one the title for the website or the website’s name? I have seen it done both ways and do not know which way is better. Thanks.

From my own personal experience with Web site creation, I would say it is most important to put your content’s title first and then put your Web site’s name. For example, my perfect situation for this post here would be:

What Should the Title Bar Say? - Web Developers

Now why do this? Well you want to get the visitors and the search engine spiders to find your content interesting. If they see the same thing over and over at the beginning, they might be less likely to click through to see what it is all about. Seeing different headlines, one after the other makes the content and the link clicking seem a lot more appealing.

[tags]titles, design, help, questions, answers, basics[/tags]