TwoLittleFishes Web design blog

Meaningful titles and headings

Don’t use clever titles and headings, instead make titles and headings obvious sign posts to the content.

If you use titles and headings that are not obvious then people have to think about what they mean. Usability expert Steve Krug‘s first law of usability is:

“Don’t make me think!”

To help people find the information they are looking for, we need to provide good information scent. If we make our titles and headings too clever and full of plays of words, then we don’t provide good information scent.

Helping people find your page

Page titles and headings are both considered important by search engines.

If you use meaningful titles and headings these will quite often contain the words that people will be searching for. Using relevent key words and phrases in your titles and headings help make your page appear more important to search engines, so your page will appear closer to the top.

Not only do search engines place importance on titles, they also use page titles to display search results.

How many times have you clicked on a link in a list of serach engine results only to find that the page has nothing to do with what you were searching for? If you make sure that your title describes the content of the page well then people will find what they are looking for and build confidence in trusting you. If they click on a link and the content does not match the content then instead they will lose confidence, beacause they were fooled into visiting your site.

Signposts for people reading the page

Providing good titles helps people to know they are reading the right page for the information they want. Good headings help people to find that information on the page.

Remember in Why is writing for the Web different?, we looked at how people read Web pages. Providing meaningful headings as signposts helps people to scan the page and find the section of the page with specific information they are looking for.

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Tags: SEO (Search engine optimisation), Valuable content, Writing for the Web

This entry was posted on Friday, January 16th, 2009 at 2:21 pm and is filed under SEO (Search engine optimisation), Writing for the Web.