Clean Your Page Title
3 Sep
I noticed that most sites have a messy page title. They have like a shit load of stuff in the page title. Now that’s not really good. You need something nice and clean. Let me try to explain why. Oh and this post is targeted towards dynamic sites like forums or blogs.
SERPs! You need to get clicked on the SERPs. People are a bit lazy. They don’t read most of the time. They “scan”. And the last thing you want is a huge page title. All you need is a good title for your post (or page).
Which one looks better to you?
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I even saw people include their tagline. Like I don’t think your site’s name, keywords and/or tagline is important. And I noticed TechCrunch, Daily Blog Tips, ProBlogger, etc with these type of “clean” page titles.
So, go ahead and clean yours up. Oh and you can put your tagline or a few good keywords in the title of your home page. Well anyways feel free to share how you like to keep your page titles and if you’re thinking about switching to these “cleaner” titles.
Update (Sept 5, 08): This isn’t really exact science. This post was made to light that bulb in your head. You need to play around and find the one that works for you. And if you plan on taking out your site’s name then don’t worry about the branding part like Kara (a reader) was. A good favicon should do the job.
Keep it short, simple and descriptive. That should work like a charm!
I disagree with you there. I believe it’s important for readers to know where they are. With lots of tabs open, it’s nice to have a little reminder of what page the web site is from. This also makes sense if readers are to bookmark pages too. it’s important to at least have the web site name in all pages of a site to keep with branding and style guide principles.
@Kara: I didn’t really make up my mind on if I should have my blog’s name in the titles or not. But, the thing is I have a favicon that should help people out when they have a lot of tabs opened.
Branding is important and so, is keeping it clean. Favicon does a bit of the branding part. But, you can always keep the site’s name and leave out unnecessary stuff like keywords or a tagline.
It isn’t really exact science. This post was to give you a few ideas and hopefully you’ll get your own style that does the job. It really is upto you, so play around and let me know what you went with.
I’ve just come here through 9rules and first congrats on also joining the team here. I’ve crafted an excessive post about this topic a few weeks ago and you might find some inspiration there!
This might really help everyone out: http://condomunity.com/headline-writing-google-social-media-readers/
I also think the titles have to be short, but nonetheless give it some descriptive value and you’re fine!
Cheers Simon
Opinions are divided, also for SEO is good that in title is the name of blog, even we don’t like it
… we can work on that though 
@Simon: Thanks for welcoming me into 9rules. I appreciate that.
I agree with you. Just keep it short and descriptive, and you’ll be good to go!