It's the Little Things

There are a lot of little things you can do to imrove your blawg (or any website for that matter). A long time ago, two little things I started doing is using a double slash (//) as the divider between sections in the title tag and always having the title tag content go from specific to general.

The reasoning behind these seemingly, unimportant decisions is purposeful, I promise. I believe both of these title tag tweaks help my sites do just a bit better in search results.

Double Slash

First, very rarely is the double slash used as a separator on websites. Often developers use a single slash, a dash or some other form of division between sections. This means that when looking through a list of search results, there is a good chance that most will be similar and mine, with the double slash, will be different. Different stands out and standing out in search results is good, as searches often lead to half or more of your traffic.

Also, when people search and begin to scan results, I believe the double slash makes the pieces of the title very easy to distinguish, which in turn makes it easier to scan the result. Easier to scan means that people will, whether conscious or not, recognize what your page is about faster than other pages.

Specific to General

The second thing I do in page titles is I start specific and then move to general. This means if I had a section named About and a page named HIstory in the about section, I would make the page title for the history page equal to “History // About // Site Name”. Basically, I make sure the piece of content most specific to what is on the page comes first.

If you search something on google and scan down the page, your eyes naturally gravitate towards the left, as it is harder to scan text in the middle of the page. Heck, it is even a proven study, that we naturally scan websites in an F-shaped pattern.

This means the first thing people will see when they search and scan the results is the first part of whatever is in your page title. So here is the question? What is most likely to be more relevant to a user’s search: the title of the page or the title of the site? 99% of the time, the specific page title is going to be the most relevant piece of the title. Knowing this and that users tend to read in an F-shape, it only makes sense to start your page titles with the most specific piece of information.

Neither of these tips are earth shattering, but I believe both are apart of the many little things that you can do to differentiate your site, especially in search results. That said, don’t use the double slashes or I’ll have to come up with a new divider. :) Go ahead. Take a few minutes to garden your blawg and make sure that your titles go from specific to general.