Uptimebot

There is much controversy around title separators. Some webmasters pay no attention to kind and functional side of title separators, some think that using right title separators is a very important step in page’s optimization. Such controversy forced me to make a research on my pages and with help of other webmasters. Here are the results.

It has been proved that various title separators actually make same sense. Well, not all of them, but the majority of title separators used by webmasters. However, I’ve seen even “<” and “[“ separators in titles of some pages – these variants are really bad, because of their HTML significance. Others – spaces, commas, hyphens, pipe tags, etc. are good – so what to choose.

The second part of research was a mass opinion check. According to the poll surfers better understand pipe tags as separators than hyphens. Hyphen reminds dash and dash is more like to be a continue of phrase, than it’s separation – thus pipe tag is better from surfers’ point of view. However, Google guides are always saying that they are looking for pages with correct English grammar – thus for pages containing correctly expressed thoughts and complete phrases and messages. Considering correct grammar, we must consider commas and hyphens instead of pipe tags.

Summary. Concluding all mentioned above, I can say that we have distinguished 3 separators that fit both search engines and surfers. It’s up to you what to choose – convenience for surfers or search engines. Both are important, so your goal is to vary these distinguished tags to please both sides.

Filed under: HTML and Page Coding