Announcements ⇒ Improved page titles

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Hi all,

today I improved the titles of our forum pages. This concerns only the content of the <title> HTML tag, which means what the title bar in the web browser shows.

Previously, a title looked like

LaTeX Community • View topic - tikZ | Picture in enumerated List

Now, the title is changed to

tikZ | Picture in enumerated List • Graphics, Figures & Tables • LaTeX Community

All of our more than 15.000 topic titles beginning with "LaTeX Community • View topic - " was very redundant, so we got rid of that: we start with the most important, the actual topic title. We won some space, so we add the subforum name, which can be a good additional information and gives further keywords. We keep the site name as last part of the title.

Our benefits of the small change:

• Of course, we got clearer titles.
• Better visible tabs in a browser, where we see the topic instead of x times the site name; browser tabs can still be easily identified by the "favicon".
• Better results in search engines, as they see more keywords (subforum) and the most important part more prominently at first. It helps us searching, and potential readers can find our solutions more easily.
• A badly chosen title is not the end of the world, as the subforum title is added. Nevertheless you should give your question a meaningful title to tell others clearly what the thread is about. You know, "Help needed!", "Beginner's question" or "Urgent!" are still pointless. Nobody searches for this, or feels attracted to open the topic. One may tell it in the body text, if at all.

Returning to our example topic - this can now also be found if users "google" for tikz graphics or tikz figures - he doesn't have to hit only the keyword picture.

Stefan