Earlier I talked about how you can make your site more accessible and improve the overall user experience by making sure your links are descriptive, unique and clear.
Another important accessibility KPI to track is the quality of page titles.
The first thing many users, especially those using screen readers, will see when they land on your website is a page title. The first impression counts. Having a vague page title, for example just the title of your website, is a missed opportunity.
What you want is to help the reader quickly understand the purpose of the page they're on. You want to set the expectations for what they'll get if they read the page. And you want to improve navigation.
What you want is a well-crafted title. For this, it’s essential that page titles are clear, descriptive and unique for each page.
A good page title should clearly describe the page’s content. If they're on the home page, you could title it "Home." That's vague. Instead, try something more descriptive like "Accessibility as a subscription - Bogdan Lazar" (this is my home page title).
You want to have descriptive titles, but also pay attention to length. Anything over 50 characters or so will get cut off in the browser tab and in search engine results.
I have two rules for page titles:
- They should be clear and relevant to each page.
- They should be unique for each page.
And please, don't stuff your page title with keywords just for "SEO reach."
Testing and tracking page title quality is not so straightforward as with link text. You'll need to manually audit your site to make sure each page's title is both unique and relevant to each page.
There are ways to automate some of this, but none that I've tested that works out of the box for what I am after. If you know of any, I'd be happy to test it and recommend it to others.
Page titles might not seem like much, but let me tell you how happy we've made a PM in a team when we gave each page a unique title. They were used to opening multiple tabs for the web app we worked on. I'm talking tens of tabs. And because all the tabs were called the same, they had to cycle through all of them to get to the one they wanted.
Let me tell you. This is not an exception. Lots of people I observed and talked to have at any point more than 20 tabs open. Lots of times tabs of the same site.
As soon as you add unique, descriptive and concise page titles, you're making sure each of those tabs is quickly accessible to everyone. Especially those with disabilities and assistive technology users.
Tracking the quality of your page titles ensures better navigation, understanding and accessibility across your site.