Aug 24 2007
Why do most Indian job sites have terrible page titles?
While browsing through the plethora of job sites in India, I noticed something that bothered me. Despite paying much attention to their homepage layouts, banners, and in some cases, even usability, most of the job sites catering to Indian professionals had pretty insipid, commonplace, arbitrary TITLE text. Most of the website titles had common phrases such as - ‘jobs’, ‘india’, ‘bangalore’, ‘chennai’, ‘pune’, ’search for jobs online’….
Now page titles are probably not the most interesting piece of virtual real estate, but couldn’t most of these companies pay a little attention to how similar they all look if they are opened next to each other in a tabbed browser? Why couldn’t the keywords be a little more enterprising, a little more descriptive, a little more differentiating? How did all the smart website designers and usability professionals miss such a small thing?
I find it odd that a well designed homepage could have an ‘HTML META ‘or an ‘HTML Tag Refresh’ listed as the page title. Shouldn’t Venture Capitalists or Private Equity analysts, those finance Gods who raise billions of dollars to fund or buy or sell these sites pay attention to how much attention their client (or their designer) pays to design detail?
IMHO, Page Title content are primarily targeted at the Search Engine bots with the intention of being listed on the first page of a search result, in order to drive more traffic.
Not many users pay much attention to what’s on the Page Title. ( Dont have data to substantiate this though :))
When it comes to SEO, the keywords (including the ones on the Page Title) need to be written in a certain manner which makes sense to these search engine bots and their algorithms. They need not necessarily be a proper statement or a sentence. However, one cant overdo or underplay keywords.
Its been found on trial and error basis, that often, search result ranking of websites are likely to increase, when such “chunks of keywords” are used instead of a “proper” sentences.
That said, i still would appreciate a “Page Title” constructed meaningfully and yet optimized for high search result ranking.