Page title standards

• Every page must have a unique page title.

• Page titles must be meaningful to the customer.

• Page titles must be short preferably less than 70 characters long.

Why do we have these standards?

Page titles are an important navigation aid and are there to help get your content found by letting users know what can be found on the page.

The page title appears in several places:

• in the bar at the top of your browser

• in the results listings of search engines

• in a browser's history list of recently visited web pages

• in a browser's bookmarks/favourite list

In many of these locations, long titles will be cut short for example:

• Google only displays the first 64 characters of a title

• using your browser's history to return to a page that you looked at earlier can be difficult if you can't see the full title

A good title that clearly conveys what a page is about will improve the page's placing in search engine results

Using the same title for different pages causes problems when looking for pages in search results, history lists and bookmarking/favourites menus

This standard is mandatory for usability and accessibility reasons.

How to apply the standards

• Use customer language.  Think about what words people might use to find your page. Include these in your title.

• Do not use Council specific phrases, jargon, abbreviations or acronyms.

• Try reading your title to someone – see if they can tell what the page is about from the title alone.

• Do not use 'Welcome to Mypage/Homepage'.

If you need to shorten a long title:

• decide which words are essential to describe the content of the page. Try rephrasing the title to include just these words.

• consider whether you could split the title and have part of the it as the first heading on the page.

Examples

Bad examples of page titles:

• Adoption home

• Eclipse

• Collections

• Sir George Staunton Country Park Joint Committee Meetings, minutes, agenda and report for the 21 march 2013

How to improve the bad ones.

• Adoption - adopt a child in Hampshire

• Eclipse - Gosport and Fareham rapid bus service

• Search Hampshire's Museums Collections

• Staunton Country Park Joint Committee - March 21 2013

Good examples of page titles:

• Hampshire school holidays and school term dates

• Hampshire school admissions - apply online

• Find my nearest waste recycling centre in Hampshire

• Contact Hampshire County Council