Blog Usability: Page Title

One of the most important aspects of blog usability is the choice of page titles. The blog name usually appears as the page title (Note that when I mention page title this means the text that appears on the tab). This is good practice since it will make it easy for your readers easier to find the tab that contains your blog in case they shift to another tab to browse other sites. However, in case your blog name is not that descriptive or somewhat cryptic what you should do is add a phrase to describe the contents of your blog.

For this blog, even if Blog Tutorials is a descriptive enough name a simple phrase “Helping you create a successful blog” was added to the page title of the main page. This is a good choice because it expounds on what Blog Tutorials is about and yet does it in just a few words. Keep in mind that when coming up with a page title try to keep it as short as possible. This is important since people usually browse using multiple windows and/or tabs so that the page titles get cut. A long page title, though descriptive, is of no value since the title won’t be seen easily anyway. Furthermore place the most important words at the beginning of the page title so that the ones that are cut off are the least important ones.

Note that for blogs the title of the blog entry is usually the one used as the page title. This means that each time you write an entry make sure your post’s title will not just be catchy but will also make for a good page title.

Originally posted on August 17, 2010 @ 1:04 pm