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There is a lot of discussion about the ultimate title for webpages. Of course much of this discussion is about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Having read Mark Jaquith’s WordPress tip on the subject I thought that I would add my own tip via the comments.

Here’s what I wrote;

Personally I use ‘%post_title% presented by %blog_title%’ or ‘%post_title% on %blog_title%’ via the All In One SEO plugin for WordPress.

This makes the title element a sentence that is easier to read and probably scores lots of points for accessibility. I read somewhere that page readers (for the blind) read the separators that so many of use have used in our title tags.

For example this page’s title [on Mark's website] would be read out, “wordpress tip colon reorder your title tag left-pointing double angle quotation mark mark on wordpress.” How annoying is that?

Another comment, by Lodewijk gave another useful WordPress tip, it read;

And while you’re at it, you could also simply replace with your own blog name. It will reduce the amount of queries to the database by one for every pageview.

All he means by this is to replace %blog_title% with actual title of your blog. A simple suggestion but not good for distributed themes!

Think about the different places that the contents between the tags are shown. Most obviously, they appear at the top of the browser window. If readers use tabs with their web browser software, titles are shown there too. Bookmark a page and the title is used as a reference to where that bookmark points. The same applies to online bookmarking like del.icio.us and similar web services like digg.com and reddit.com. Drag a URL from a browser to your desktop and the title will be used.

For these reasons webpage titles must be descriptive and relevant to the page content. Ideally they will not contain separators such as colons ‘:’, pipes ‘|’, left ‘«’ or right-pointing double angle quotation marks ‘»’ and the like. Omitting these improves accessibility and, I would imagine, probably improve your SEO.

After Mark Jaquith’s tip links led me to the following SEO articles, all of which are worth reading if you want to optimize your website or blog for the search engines:

Semantic Header Markup Means Search Engines Will Understand Too
The Simplest Most Effective SEO Move You Can Make
Magnetic Headlines
The Sound of the Accessible Title Tag Separator

Update added on April 25, 2008

As mentioned in Phil Nash’s comment below screen reader users are used to punctuation being read out and the less verbose delimiters are acceptable. He uses double colons ‘::’, as I have done in the past, and I think that this is a suitable and acceptable delimiter, if required.

Conclusion

If you wanted to use your blog’s name and the post’s title along with a keyword or category then consider these three ways of formatting that information between the title tags.

Bad Title:
♦♦♦ $BlogName » $Category » $PostTitle ♦♦♦

Good Title:
$PostTitle :: $Category :: $BlogName

Screen Read Friendly Title:
$PostTitle presented by $BlogName and filed under $Category

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