Here is a quick little post about a neat little feature that some of you may not know about. It’s the acronym title.
Suppose you like a mouseover text box explaining your acronym, say BWI for example. See the little underline underneath my BWI, and the mouseover text box? Continue reading »
When the the king of search looks to optimize its own content for search results, you know it’s not by going out and buying back links. They get those free of charge by their millions of users who love their resources. So what can Google do to improve their own rankings? They optimize their code on-site. Continue reading »
The title of this post was partially developed by you! You may be asking at this point, why and how? To answer why, I’m trying to write content that my audience seems to like the most. To answer how, well that is what this post is about.
Using Google Analytics, I decided to look at the top content on this site to get some post ideas. I’ve done this before looking at my Feedburner statistics, and what tags are popular on this site. This method is a little unique though. I wasn’t targeting ideas, I was targeting what keywords within the titles were sparking user interest. Continue reading »
Just finished your website? It looks great, and is ready to rock! Have you made sure you titled the pages yet? This may seem like a silly thing to ask, but I just visited about 200 small business website over the past two days. Nearly 10% of them titled their home page “Home”. All I can say about that is, Ouch! I even found a few big companies doing it. Even worse, some didn’t even title their pages at all. Continue reading »
Every morning I like to read blogs and forums. Here are the top three I found of value today. Continue reading »
For those of you that read my daily Today’s Read posts you know that I find new posts by using Google Alerts. I pick my favorite keyword phrases, Google finds all the blogs that use them, email them to me, and I check them out in the morning.
Each alert that Google sends me usually has about three to five blogs that use the keyword that day. I have alerts for a bunch of keywords, so I get a bunch of blogs to read. I don’t check out all the blogs because they are not always relevant though. How can I tell? It’s in their title. I’m not going to read a post about improving the “usability” of kitchenware. I just read the posts about improving the “usability” of websites.
Each blog Google mentions also include a brief description with the title, but I usually only read those when I’m am unsure if the content is what I am looking for. Just like most users read websites, I skim. Continue reading »
Just a quick little tip for those of you with member pages on your site. Don’t forget to title the internal pages. Check this screenshot out.
I got this from a fairly popular website that I will spare from mentioning. I was a little surprised to find it there, or should I say not find it. I had logged in, decided to bookmark it, and realized it had the completely worthless title of “Index”. Imagine if all my tabs or windows were on sites like theirs. It just might get a little confusing.
Good titles make good anchors, easy to find bookmarks, and easy to find windows or tabs. Here is a post I wrote a while back on page titles.
So you have just hired me to do my basic Usability and Design Analysis. I open up my browser, and then visit your site. What is the first thing that I look at? It’s the title of your site. The title of your site, though often out of site and out of mind, is an extremely valuable part of a website. It’s so important, I have made it a point to check this item first.
Valuable Assets of a Website TitleOne of my favorite things to do when I see “Title Abuse” is to imagine it on a book cover. Would you really put that crazy, long, keyword like list, as the title of your website? Many do. Before you make the mistake yourself though, you should spend a little time thinking about the value of a site or page title. A short quality title does many things.
If you use my sample book in the image on the right, “A site feedback usability design seo web hosting search blog review layout flash for Dummies” you can see the title does not mean much. It’s obviously a keyword plug, and if it were put on a book it would look like crap. Well guess what? That’s what it’s worth on a website as well.
Think about some famous book titles for example: “The Stand”, “Catch 22″, or a less fictional books like “HTML for Dummies”. Notice something in common? They are all short. In fact, if you were to search for long book titles on the net you will find that the longest ones are not much longer than seventy characters total. Think there is truth to the fact that SEO experts say to keep your title to a maximum of sixty-five characters? I do. Anything after sixty-five, and it all starts turning to meaningless mush. Write a book or something. A good title will inspire, create curiosity, and define content within, and it will do it quickly. It will also appear more real to a search engine.
Titling your home page “Home Page” is descriptive, but it’s worthless in a stack of other bookmarked pages. When creating your title, make sure you think about what it will look like when someone bookmarks the page. This reasoning is also valuable when looking for your site by means of toolbar or tabs in your browser. Imagine having ten tabs open in your browser, and they all said “Home Page”. Title says where? It better, or at least give a very good clue.
Well duh. I think you know what a title is for, right? Maybe not. I have done hundreds of analyses, and have seen countless pages tittled in horrible ways, and capitalization? Did anyone graduate high school? Titles are to be capitalized for starters. It is how we identify content. It is similar in context as your name, and in fact is the NAME of the website or website page.
Knowing this leads to a less obvious, but just as important issue. It’s how your site is presented or introduced by others. If you had used the crazy long example I had above, or “Home Page”, others who found your content may choose to link to your site with their own title ideas. That’s fine, but you may not like it if the link was “Crappy Example of Site Title”, and the URL went straight to your home page. Give them a name, a.k.a. title, as an idea to use as the anchor text.
You must also not forget robots. Computers scouring the web for pages. They find your site, they list your site, and they use the title defined in your Meta. Hope you have a good one, because they may keep the cruddy one cached for a long time. Additionally, having a great title can often equal more clicks when your site is in a long list of others. That is a reason alone to come up with a good one. Help others and computers recognize your site for what it is, and give it a proper title. Encouraging action is not a crime against titles. Go for it!
I think one reason titles get abused and ignored, and often at the same time is because we don’t always see them. If they are too long they get cut off, and the really only place you see them in near entirety is in the applications main bar on top. Who looks there? Abuse gets kicked in by those trying to pimp their site out for search engines (oooh, that one extra placement of that keyword will slam dunk this site for #1), and nobody notices or complains. Soon enough, search engines figure it out, people figure it out, and the site dies before it even had time to begin.
What do I do when I start working on a new page? I start by creating a high quality title. That way, I know what I am working on.
I’m not the worlds biggest fan of drop down or expandable menu’s, but I would not dismiss using them. They often improve navigation. My big problem with them is they are often tiny, or clumsy, and end up creating more work than they are worth.
Yesterday I was doing an analysis of this site, Spanish Courses in Argentina, and found a fantastic example on how to do one right.
First, the main menu items have drop down arrows indicating that there is more below. Many, or should I say most sites do not have that. Those sites need to get with the plan, and start including them.
Second, text and menu was large enough that it was easy to use with little chance for error.
Third, the hyperlinks were expanded beyond just the text. This makes it even easier to use without error. Notice the highlighted “Contact Us” link that I have taken in the screenshot. The entire orange space is the hyperlink, not just the text.
Fourth, clicking on the main menu buttons without expanding them still navigates you to the first page listed. It’s not just a title, it’s as it appears, a link.
Finally, the fith great technique they used was to have the main menu item change color when the visitor is anywhere within that category. This gives the same effect as breadcrumbs, but without the extra menu.
If you are considering building an expandable or drop down menu for your own site I would suggest taking lesson from this site. Their links could have used titles, and maybe it could have been coded differently, but in regards to usability I give it two thumbs up. Will I be learning Spanish in Argentina? No.
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