Better Results From Better Page Titles

In my recent travels--centered around adding unobtrusive instrumentation to online stores, about which you will hear more later--I've noticed a disturbing pattern. See if you can spot what's wrong with the following list of page titles for Mister Scaly's Home Herpetology Supply, a fictional online store catering to people who keep reptiles as pets:

• Mister Scaly's Home Herpetology Supply - Everything You Need For Your Ophidian and Iguanian Friends


• Mister Scaly's Home Herpetology Supply - Everything You Need For Your Ophidian and Iguanian Friends - Products


• Mister Scaly's Home Herpetology Supply - Everything You Need For Your Ophidian and Iguanian Friends - Products - Lighting


• Mister Scaly's Home Herpetology Supply - Everything You Need For Your Ophidian and Iguanian Friends - Products - Lighting - Heat Lamps


• Mister Scaly's Home Herpetology Supply - Everything You Need For Your Ophidian and Iguanian Friends - Products - Lighting - Heat Lamps - ToastyLizard Inc


• Mister Scaly's Home Herpetology Supply - Everything You Need For Your Ophidian and Iguanian Friends - Products - Lighting - Heat Lamps - ToastyLizard Inc - 100w Infrared Heat Lamp


• Mister Scaly's Home Herpetology Supply - Everything You Need For Your Ophidian and Iguanian Friends - Products - Lighting - Heat Lamps - ToastyLizard Inc - 100w Replacement Bulb


• Mister Scaly's Home Herpetology Supply - Everything You Need For Your Ophidian and Iguanian Friends - Products - Lighting - Heat Lamps - ToastyLizard Inc - Nibble-Proof Extension Cord

See it? Except for the first in the list, each of these titles is written backwards. The part the reader cares about most--the product name or category--is listed at the end of the title rather than at the beginning, and that's not good.

In many situations, characters beyond a certain limit--sixty to a hundred, in the case of Google search results--will be truncated, leaving the reader with a big pile of identically-titled results. As you might imagine, this is terrible for conversion rates, and doesn't make for great bookmarks, tab titles, or navigation in general.

For better readability, you want something a little more like this:

• Mister Scaly's Home Herpetology Supply - Everything You Need For Your Ophidian and Iguanian Friends


• Products - Mister Scaly's Home Herpetology Supply


• Lighting - Mister Scaly's Home Herpetology Supply


• Heat Lamps - Lighting - Mister Scaly's Home Herpetology Supply


• ToastyLizard Inc - Heat Lamps - Mister Scaly's Home Herpetology Supply


• 100w Infrared Heat Lamp - ToastyLizard Inc - Mister Scaly's Home Herpetology Supply


• 100w Replacement Bulb - ToastyLizard Inc - Mister Scaly's Home Herpetology Supply


• Nibble-Proof Extension Cord - ToastyLizard Inc - Mister Scaly's Home Herpetology Supply

Things To Do

• On your front page, run the full store name and slogan. Don't prepend "Home" or "Welcome."


• On all other pages, drop the slogan. Your main title is descriptive enough without it. (If it isn't, make it so!)


• Only run one or two levels of "breadcrumbs" on each title. There's no need to have "Products" in every title; your readers are in your store, so just about every page has products on it.


• Don't run more than two levels of indexes on a title; when we went from Heat Lamps to the ToastyLizard Inc category page, we dropped "Lighting" from the title.

Just as you want your store to appear in the first page of search results on Google, you want the most important part of your page title--the name of the product you're trying to sell--to be read first. So put it at the front of the title!

Kent Brewster, Web Guy, Vurve