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How different should the <title> tags be for each page on my domain?

Which of the following are better examples are "better practice":

  • Home - Example Dog Grooming Company
  • About Us - Example Dog Grooming Company
  • Contact Us - Example Dog Grooming Company

OR

  • Example Dog Grooming Company
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
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  • 1
    Your examples are often the tough ones. How much imagination can go into these? Not much. Your first example is fine. Worry about people and not machines. However, for regular content, then you want to make sure your title tag matches the content. Think book or article title or headline if that helps.
    – closetnoc
    Feb 2, 2015 at 20:29
  • About Us - Example Dog Grooming Company
    – Chaoley
    Feb 6, 2015 at 2:42

2 Answers 2

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I would go with some version of option #1 because its clean and consistent which will help with click through rate. Whenever you are dealing with titles, think about the best way to quickly convey to the person what the page is about.

For SEO I would focus on local. For your home page I would do something like "Dog Grooming - City, State | Example Dog Grooming Company". I would also do some version of this on the contact us and about us pages.

Note: All of these are just suggestions. If you really want this to be effective you will need to do some keyword analysis and look at your local competition. I wouldn't over think the titles too much. For a local business your reputation and quality of services will be key and not how much your Contact Us pages has been optimized.

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  • I forgot about local search!
    – closetnoc
    Feb 2, 2015 at 20:36
  • I also did as well. So used to working with content driven sites that have nothing to do with a physical location. I never get to do local anymore. Not quite sure how I feel about that haha
    – dasickle
    Feb 2, 2015 at 20:39
  • 1
    Local is perfect for retail, however, it can also possibly hurt you. I have a one page website for our weekend antique business. It is not unusual for people to drive hours to see us from other states. I avoided local search mostly because we are event driven and not location driven.
    – closetnoc
    Feb 2, 2015 at 20:42
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The content of the title element should identify documents

[…] even when they are used out of context, for example in a user's history or bookmarks, or in search results.

So for a typical website, each page’s title should consist of two parts (in that order):

  1. what the page is about ("About Us")
  2. to which site this page belongs ("Example Dog Grooming Company")

(Exception: the home page, which can contain the site name only.)

The first part often contains more than just the main content heading, e.g., metadata like category or page type ("… - Blog", "Review: …", etc.).

For the second part it can make sense to abbreviate the site name if the shorter form is also meaningful for and known by your visitors.

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