Choosing an Effective Page Title

You must enter a carefully worded title for each page you publish, because the title describes your page to the Web in myriad ways.

For example, when a visitor to your page creates a bookmark or favorite for your page in his or her browser, the title typically becomes the name of the bookmark or favorite.

Also, Web directories (such as Yahoo!) and spiders (programs that build Web directories by searching the Web and cataloging its contents) use the title as a primary reference for what the page is about. Give your page a poorly worded title, and it might not come up in the hit list when folks search on the very topic your page covers.

When people use Yahoo!, Excite, and other Web-searching tools, you want them to find your page when your page really matches what they want, and not to find your page when it's not a good match. Entering a good, descriptive title is one step in ensuring that match.

Don't confuse the page title with any big, bold heading that may top a Web page and serve as its apparent title. Remember: By the time a visitor sees that top-level heading, he or she has already arrived at your page and is presumably already interested in its subject, so that top heading can be more creative than the real page titleeven subtle. But the true title must be descriptive, not clever.

Remember: The title entered in the Page Properties dialog box does not appear on the page itself, but rather in the title bar of the browser window in which the page is displayed.

An effective title should accurately describe the contents or purpose of your page. The title should also be fairly shortno more than six to eight wordsand its most descriptive words should appear first.

A bookmark list or Web directory often has room for only the first few words of a title, so your title needs to be short, and those first few words must be meaningful.

The following are some good titles:

Sammy's Racquetball Directory

The Video Store Online

All About Trout Fishing

Marvin C. Able's Awesome Home Page

Weehauken, NJ, Events for July

In these good examples, notice that the most specific, important descriptor appears within the first three words: Racquetball, Video, Trout, Marvin C. Able, and Weehauken, NJ, Events.

Notice also that the fewest possible words are used to nail down the page. In the first example, you learn in three words that this page is a directory of racquetball- related information and that it's Sammy's directory (to distinguish it from any other racquetball directories). What more do you need to know?

The following, for comparison, are some lousy titles:

My Home Page

Things to Do

Schedule of Events

A Catalog of Links and Documents Provided as a Public Service for Persons Researching Population Trends

In the first three crummy examples, the titles are nondescript; they contain nothing about the specific contents of the page. The last example, although containing some useful information at the end, would be trimmed to its first four or five words in a bookmark list, and those first few words say nothing useful.

Now that you know a little more about effective titles, you may want to change the titles of pages you've already started developing. The following example shows how.

1. In Composer, open (or create) the page file whose title you want to change.

2. Choose Format, Page Colors and Properties (see Figure 19.1).

   Figure 19.1. Step 2: Choose Format, Page Colors and Properties.

   

3. In the Title area, type (or edit to your liking) the title shown (see Figure 19.2).

   Figure 19.2. Step 3: Type your title.

   

   

   When typing your new title, be careful to capitalize and spell it exactly as you want it to appear in a title bar or bookmark list.

   Don't bother trying to use character formatting, such as bold or italics, in the title. No character formatting is possible within the text-entry areas in the Page Properties dialog box, and even if it were, it wouldn't show up anywhere titles typically appear.

4. You may optionally type your name in the Author area, although this information will not appear anywhere on the page. Instead, it will appear within the HTML code to identify the author to anyone examining the code, usually a fellow Web author who admires your handiwork.

5. Finally, you may type a description for your page. To learn more about the description, see the next section, "Helping Search Pages Catalog Your Page."