I read a great article about the Google Inline Search boxes over at Get Elastic and was immediately inspired about how we structure our page titles can really affect our users’ perceptions and ease in finding information; especially using new services like Google’s new search box.
Take a look at the following image of the insite search in action:
What I immediately notice is that every entry starts with the words “Nine West,” which is a tad redundant when looking at a full page of results from the same site.
While obvious to some, I think this is a perfect example of how to better organize page titles, and why usability/readability matters when writing page titles.
If we were to place “Nine West” from each of the entries listed in the image at the end of the page titles, we’d organize the title structure into:
[Specific Product Name] – [Product Category] – [Company Name]
Using a product from the image above, entries would look like:
“Heathers Black Leather – Dress Shoes – from Zappos.com”
This would make it much easier for users to make visual sense out of how listings display.
Just as we organize URLs to make more sense, titles should have the same considerations. I don’t need to see the company name first thing in the title – usually people know which site they’re on.
I look forward to see how this might affect searches on Google in the future, and to see some analytics data come through on if people are actually using it.
