Page titles

Users should be able to tell what's on the page before they click on it. The title of a page is incredibly important because it tells a user whether they've ended up on the right page. It also supports SEO to help your page show up in search engine results. Titles should:

  • Be concise, powerful, and descriptive of what your page is about (around 50 characters maximum).
  • Be unique to the page, and clearly distinguished from pages with similar or related content.
  • Be specific and give as much context as possible. “Annual Report” will be meaningless to users. A better title would be “Biosolids Demonstration 2014 Annual Summary Report."
  • Incorporate keywords that users will use to search for the page. For example, if your page is “Ralph Klein Park rental information,” users will find your page in search results for “Ralph”, “Klein”, “Park”, ”rental” or “information”.
  • Not include special characters (e.g. & , *, %) except in proper nouns like "Animal & Bylaw Services".
  • Use sentence case - only first word and proper nouns are capitalized.

Examples

  • Poor: Welcome to the Neighbourwoods program
    Better: Neighbourwoods tree planting program
  • Poor: Contact us
    Better: Contact Animal Services
  • Poor: Bylaw 5442004 - Fires
    Better: Fire pit regulations

Titles must be set in two areas of a page: 

  1. <h1> element - appears in the content area or <body>
    • This is the title that appears on the top of the webpage (automatically) or in the hero banner
    • Should let users know what content is on the page
    • Example: Recreation Facilities
  2. <title> tag - set under page properties or <head>
    • This title appears in the browser tab, as a bookmark in the browser, in search engine results and in social media feeds
    • Describes the content of the page, but also needs enough detail to stand alone in other contexts
    • When a web page is published on calgary.ca, "The City of Calgary" and a dash is automatically added before the page title. Example: "The City of Calgary - Recreation Facilities"
    • When creating a new page, this title is initially linked to the URL, but can be changed after the URL has been set. The Title and URL should be similar, but URLs frequently have fewer words.

See also