WebAxe Episode 21
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Announcer: Welcome to WebAxe, practical web accessibility tips.
Dennis: Hello, and welcome to WebAxe Episode 21, Page Titles for Accessibility and SEO. So, today what we're going to be discussing is page titles, meaning not the heading tag or anything, but the actual title tag in the head of the HTML document or XHTML document and why this is good, especially for accessibility, and also for SEO - search engine optimization. The primary reason you want a good, accurate, and unique page header for accessibility is, just so a person knows, well, it has to do with SEO and usability also, but especially for accessibility. The user should know what page they're on. Say, if they're using a screen reader, the first thing that the user is going to hear is the page title. So it will be easier for the user to know what page he or she is on. The same thing goes for usability reasons, as far as a visual clue or anchor of where you are at, along the same lines as what bread crumbs do. As you may or may not know, there are many other reasons why a title tag is so important. Other reasons are just for bookmarking. When you bookmark or make a page a favorite in your browser, usually the browser, the user agent, will use that title tag as the name of your bookmark. Obviously, it's important to have an accurate one. If it says "Page 1" or "Untitled Page", it's not going to be too friendly for the user when they're trying to find that page again.
And the next reason is for printing purposes. When you print an HTML page, the title tag will show on the page that you print out in the header of the actual printed document, along with the date and stuff.
And another really big reason for accurate page titles, in addition to accessibility and usability purposes is for search engine optimization. I'll just touch on that real fast. If you're not real familiar with SEO, a good practice is to optimize your pages for search engines to spider it and accurately cache or log your site there for users to find, is to have an accurate title tag or page title. What you want to do is, the key words and phrases for your page or your site for that matter should be included in your page title and your keywords and your description and your META tags. On the first part of content on your page, if you can, and in some alt tags, if you can. That's a straight forward and good practice to make your web page search engine optimized.
Another reason to have a good page title is for search results. For search engines, but also if you're creating your own search on your website, either if it's an internal site or a public external facing site. When you bring up the search results, a lot of times for different ways to search, a lot of times when the results come up, what you're going to see is the title tag for that page, and it will be linked to the page. That's just another reason, again, why it's important to have a good accurate title tag.
Now, a couple issues about that. One issue, when you're writing a title tag, I like to put the name of the site or an abbreviation of the name of the site, and then the name of the section, and then the actual name of the page, all in the title tag, and divide it by carats. Or colons. Those are the most widely accepted characters in the bread crumbs or the title tag to separate out those elements. So everybody has an opinion on what's the best methodology for a page title. You could put the name of the company or the site, then just a long descriptive title of that page. That might even be better because you might have more key words in there to balance with your META data and the actual content of the page, which is important for SEO.
One other key note is when you're writing the title tag, special characters like the ampersand, make sure you use the proper character and coding for that. The ampersand would be the ampersand-AMP semicolon, for example.
And there you have it, you follow those little practices and follow the links on this website blog and you will find yourself making some more effective title tags. So remember, it's very, very important for accessibility, but also for usability and search engine optimization. Please leave any feedback, if you have any comments to this podcast. And you could leave a comment on the blog at webaxe.blogspot.com, or phone in a comment. I haven't gotten any that are really usable yet, so please phone in a comment and I will put that in the next podcast (206) 202-3678. This is Dennis signing off, thanks for listening.
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Transcription by CastingWords