adrian holovaty

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October 25, 2002, 5:41 PM ET

Page titles on news article pages

Ben e-mailed me a slew of questions regarding page titles on news article pages. (Page titles are the words displayed in the browser window's titlebar and in most search results). I'll attempt to tackle Ben's questions here and try to figure out a "best practice" for news sites to follow. Of course, feel free to chip in by posting a comment below.

First, here's my philosophy on exactly what titles on news sites should accomplish: A good news article page title succinctly explains the page's content -- and how that content fits into the big picture of the site.

So how can we accomplish this? First, let's look at what sites are already doing. Here are a number of different approaches, with a few example titles:

Headline only

Site name, headline

Site name, section, headline

Headline, site name

Site name, headline, date

Site name, date, headline

Print publication name, site name, headline

Whew. Not too much consistency throughout the industry. So which approach is best? Let's tackle the pieces of information one at a time:

Site name

Think about this from a user's perspective.

Say you bookmark a few New York Times articles about the sniper shootings. Then you bookmark a few articles on the same topic from the Washington Post, and a few others from USA Today and the BBC.

Now let's say it's a day later, and you'd like to go back to a particular one of those stories. Will it be easier to remember the story by its headline, or by its publication name? (Keep in mind these are all articles on the same topic, so it's likely they'll have similar headlines.)

I'm betting you'll remember the story by publication. A headline alone most likely wouldn't be enough to remind you which bookmark link to click.

Same goes for search results from an external search engine; a site name in the title gives extra context to a search result. It's not only good branding; it also helps give weight and credibility to a particular search result by disclosing the publication's name upfront.

Verdict: Yes, include it.

Site section

It may make sense from a navigational standpoint, but I think sections are better left out. If a headline is descriptive enough, the section is redundant.

Verdict: No, don't include it.

Date

Because the date (e.g., timeliness) is such an important part of a news story, I venture to say yes. But page titles can only be so long before they get unwieldy. For that reason, I'd advise to leave dates out.

An exception: Dates that are fundamentally tied to content. For example, something like a "Quote of the day" page. It wouldn't make sense to put the quote itself in the page title; rather, the date would work well.

Verdict: No, don't include it -- unless absolutely necessary.

Name of print publication

As I mention above, sacbee.com does this. I think it's redundant and a waste of precious title space. If a page's title already includes the site's name, there's absolutely no logical reason to include the print publication's name as well.

Verdict: No, no, no! Avoid this, as long as the page title already includes the site name.

Priorities

So, how does this fit together? I've determined all that really needs to be included in a news site's title page is the site name and headline. But which is more important?

For the answer to this question, look no further than Jakob Nielsen's "Marginalia of Web Design" and "Microcontent: How to Write Headlines, Page Titles, and Subject Lines." A snippet from the latter:

Make the first word an important, information-carrying one. Results in better position in alphabetized lists and facilitates scanning. For example, start with the name of the company, person, or concept discussed in an article.

Do not make all page titles start with the same word: they will be hard to differentiate when scanning a list. Move common markers toward the end of the line. For example, the title of this page is Microcontent: Headlines and Subject Lines (Alertbox Sept. 1998).

With that in mind, it appears the best solution is "headline, site name" -- the technique used by washingtonpost.com. That lets users scan a list of titles easily while retaining the site's name for purposes of branding and familiarity.

Before I finish, a few more points...

Internal search engines

One of Ben's questions was whether to optimize page titles for internal or external search engines. My answer: Do both. Optimize titles for external search engines, such as Google, but display just the headline for an internal search engine. After all, a decent configurable internal search engine should be able to display whatever you want.

An example of this technique is this very site. Results from my own search engine display blog entry headlines, while page titles are preceded with "holovaty.com." (Note that I'll be changing my site's title scheme shortly, in the spirit of following my own guidelines.)

Multi-page articles

It's important to differentiate page titles when an article is spread over more than one page. For an example of what not to do, check out this article:

Each part of the article has the same page title. It'd be better if the page number was included in the title.

Punctuation / character separators

Ben asks: "Is it bad to use hyphens or colons as separators since those often get used in story titles or archive pages?"

Excellent question. Here's a particularly exaggerated example of colon misuse:

Maneater: Steve Lippo: MU halftime: a grand tradition

I made that site's CMS, so, naturally, I'm super-qualified to pick on it. The site inserts "Maneater:" at the start of every article's title. For columns, it also inserts the columnist's name, along with another colon. Thus, when there's a colon in the headline, too, the amount of colons gets just plain silly. It becomes difficult to scan and hard to tell where the real headline begins. In hindsight, a better organization for this particular headline would be:

MU halftime: a grand tradition [Maneater]

I opted to use brackets instead of parentheses because parentheses tend to imply a relationship, while brackets are a bit more distant. Let's say I write an article about my favorite Web site, google.com, and it appears on cnn.com with the headline "My favorite Web site." With parentheses, following my guideline above would yield:

My favorite Web site (cnn.com)

The parentheses and word placement might lead a casual browser to believe my favorite Web site is cnn.com, when, in actuality, the article is about Google and happens to be published on cnn.com. See the distinction? Brackets imply less of a relationship:

My favorite Web site [cnn.com]

A pipe ( | ) could also be used. I'd like to hear some opinions on which character(s) is/are best.

Non-story pages

All my comments here apply only to story pages. Other pages, like news sites' home pages, are a whole different story. I'll tackle that issue in the future.

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