Page Titles

Note: These guidelines have been updated in June 2011. Please familiarize yourself with the new guidelines.

The page title displays in the border of each Web page and is an additional way to identity your site. It also helps with search optimization to make the site identifiable in Google and other search engine results.

The page title of all UMass Amherst web sites should include the words University of Massachusetts Amherst or UMass Amherst and the name of your office, department or program. These phrases may appear in any order. You may include other relevant keywords that are important for your specific department but keep in mind that Google search results will only display up to about 66 characters.

Examples:

To create a title tag in HTML

Edit the <title> attribute in the code for your Web pages. In the above example of the Biology Department Web site, this code is:

<title>UMass Amherst: Biology Department</title>

Many web development applications have a shortcut to make this task easier.

To create a title tag in a Drupal site

By default, Drupal will title all your pages showing the page title followed by the site title as you've defined them in the site settings. This may not give your the flexibility or specificity you want. You can use the Drupal module Page Title to give you more control over page titles. The Page Title module is pre-installed in all Drupal sites provisioned by OIT.

More

For more help with using title tags and search engine optimization, please see these sites:

• Google Webmaster Center: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Title Tag Best Practices