Lately I’ve been asked about the importance of title tags in web pages. Here are a few points to bear in mind when using title tags:

• They are one of the most important elements of site optimisation. One of the first elements that a crawler looks at when examining your site is the title tags
• Don’t use your company name in the title tag, use descriptive keywords that let the users know what’s on the page. Remember that the best title tags are the ones that contain targeted keywords, develop a brand for the site and are attention grabbing.
• Try to keep title tags less than 50 characters. Some search engines only index the first 50 characters. It will also help you to come up with concise keywords
• Don’t repeat keywords in your title tags
• Search engine spiders use the title tags to detemine what your page is about
• In search engine results, the title tag appears as the link on which users will click. If your title tags are inaccurate, or don’t contain keywords that describe the page, users won’t be clicking through on your site

There has been a lot of talk about the effectiveness or lack thereof of embedded scrollbars used on web pages. Those scrolling pieces of content that are contained within the body of a webpage.

Web users scan text when looking at a web page. They take in the first couple of keywords of each phrase and make assumptions on whether it’s interesting or not before continuing. This happens in a split second. So think about that user that hits your site, briefly scans through the content to see if it’s useful to her, misses the scrollbar and all the wonderful content which goes with it and bye bye, you’ve lost your potential customer.

A lot of users completely miss the scrollbar. So if you’re an e-commerce site and a user has to scroll to view your product, chances are that some users are going to assume that you have a very thin offering of products! This is particularly true if you don’t use the standard scrollbars that most users are familiar with – default windows or mac scrollbars. If it’s flash based or is unusual in any way, you have less chance of the user identifying that they need to scroll.

Then there’s the frustration effect: If a user has to keep scrolling to view content they’ll get frustrated and go elsewhere. Web users are fickle, most of them come to a site to find specific information – this is the nature of the web.

Sometimes it’s unavoidable to use scrollbars, but I’d recommend, where possible, to remove them. If you have to use them, make sure that they’re a standard look and feel.

According to usability guru Jakob Nielson, web users are becoming more impatient when browsing websites. According to Nielson, users are more accustomed to using the web, and when looking for information, they don’t want all the frilly bells and whistles that come with some websites. Most of the time they’re looking for specific information, and will often hit internal landing pages referred from search engines, rather than navigating from the homepage of a website. Users have little patience, and in true popular culture they want relevent information as quickly as possible. This again highlights the importance of search engines in driving qualified traffic to your site. Make sure your internal pages are well optimised to enable users to find the information they want when they’re entering search terms from search engines.

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The intention of this blog is to publish opinions and interesting developments in Internet and web development. The web industry is dynamic and changes unbelievably quickly, so, we aim to put our thoughts and predictions down as we move through this exciting space (watch this space!).

Netpilot Internet Solutions is a web development company based in Perth, Australia. We provide web services including Internet development and design and search engine optimisation.