What Titles and URLs may Reveal about your Site
Posted: Fri 06/29/2007 by ramiroAccording to 37 organic search engine optimization experts the Keyword Use in Title Tag is the number one of the positive factors that influence the search engine ranking of a page.
When I search for something and see the result page the first thing I do is take a look at the titles of the linked pages, than I look at the URLs before I actually click on one of the links. Titles and URLs often reveal more than just whether the result may be good or not.
A URL containing the word node as the first part after the domain is very likely to belong to a Drupal site, I guess chances are at least 99.9%. If the URL contains ?p=999 it's probably Wordpress, com_frontpage looks very much like Joomla and funny URLs such as about.999.1.html are often used on TYPO3 sites, just to name a few of the popular open source CMS out there.
Similarly the title may indicate what system is being used. If it contains the vertical bar character | chances are not too bad that the site is powered by Wordpress or Drupal, because it's common in these systems to use this character as a separator of the page title and the site name.
Using the site name as part of every title may have some benefits, especially if it contains keywords that relate to most of the content. If this is not often the case or the site name doesn't relate to the content at all, it doesn't make much sense to include the site name in every title.
The length of the title and the keyword density do play a role for search engines when ranking pages. The longer the title and the fewer important keywords it contains, the lower the above mentioned influence of the number one ranking factor.
On this Drupal powered site I decided to exclude the site name in the titles of full node views and use only the node's title. In teaser listings, on the front page, and all other pages I wanted to include the site name. To do so I put this little piece of code in my page.tpl.php between the HTML title tags.
<?php
print (arg(0) == 'node' && is_numeric(arg(1))) ? $title : $head_title;
?>Actually, I am not a big fan of the ternary operator, because it makes code harder too read. But when the expression fits on one line I tend to forget about that.
I've found a specific formatting often improves the ternary operator readability in a big way:
<?php $result = condition ? true_value : false_value; ?>it provides a visual cue about the actual structure, and helps keep the lines below a sensible width.
This looks definitely more readable. Think I'll give it a try.
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