Picto thématique

Rule n° 98 - Each page provides a title that enables one to identify its content

Identifying the site by looking at the title of a page is good, but understanding very quickly the nature of the content of a page is even better. And search engines won't say otherwise.

#Accessibility #SEO #Identification and contact #Editorial

Goal

  • Allow users to immediately identify the nature of each page’s content in tabs, favorites, windows, browser histories, and screen readers.
  • Improve the pages’ SEO and their presentation in search engine results.
  • Improve the accessibility of content for people with disabilities.

Implementation

Write the content of the title element of each page so that it describes, as concisely as possible, the content or function of the page, including after an Ajax request which significantly modifies the content of the page.

Specify the current process step in the title element of the pages. For example, write "Step 3 of your registration" in the title element of the page corresponding to the third step of a registration form.

Specify, in the case of displaying a series of search results, what is the range of results displayed in the current page. For example, “Search results 10 to 19 on 'Foo'".

Specify the status in the title of a confirmation or cancellation request page when submitting a form (for example: “Confirm deletion - My documents ”).

Control

On all pages of the website, including process pages or in a series of search results, also on the pages where the content can be greatly modified using Ajax:

  • Check that each page title (title element) identifies the content or function of the page.

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Overview and background

The 240 Opquast rules are defined and agreed upon by an extensive community of web professionals and academics. These web quality assurance guidance rules started as a list of best practices 20 years ago. They have since been revised every five years and have been tried and tested via millions of web interactions by Opquast community’s customers, including the leading CMS communities which have developed plugins for WordPress, Drupal and Prestashop. The most recent version, v4, was established in 2020.

Each rule has individual technical sheets and the rules can be searched by project phase or various topics: e-commerce, data-privacy, internationalization, security, code, etc, or by themes: accessibility, SEO, mobile, privacy, and ecodesign. The complete checklist is available on a creative commons license BY-SA.

To learn more about the Opquast approach, read this article published at Smashing Magazine

Broad application and benefits

The rules should be applied to your projects from the design phase through to post-implementation , and they should be understood by all professionals with web and customer experience (CX) responsibilities: from strategy to operations, marketers to project managers, and editorial to technical staff. The benefits of using this ruleset are numerous, including improving customer satisfaction, web performance, and e-commerce, and expanding your client base, while also decreasing your errors and costs.

Multidisciplinary verticles - accessiiblity, SEO, e-commerce, ecodesign etc..- starting from the foundational Opquast base.

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