Web Guidelines: MIT Libraries

Title Tags

<title></title>

Consistency

Where possible, make these 3 things match:

• name of the link to your page
• visible name at top of page
• title tag

Sometimes you'll need to break this rule, but keep it in mind as a general principle.

Specific --> General

For our site, title tags go from specific to general. For example, this page could be:

Title tags: Web Style Guidelines: Web Advisory Group: MIT Libraries

However, sometimes it makes sense to leave out a level of the hierarchy because it's redundant, or to make it shorter. So you might decide (as we did for these pages) to leave out "web advisory group" on all the pages of this sub-site:

Title tags: Web Style Guidelines: MIT Libraries

Title tags appear in search engine results pages, and in people's bookmarks. So it's important to think about making them clear to someone out of the context of our site. They may see your title tag in a results screen from a Google search.

So for that reason, always include "MIT Libraries" as the last element of your title tag.

Sometimes you may want to change the colon separators to actual words, to make it more clear what the page is. For example,

Annual Reports: MIT Libraries

has been changed to:

Annual Reports of the MIT Libraries

..to distinguish it from reports of companies that we may supply.