All about descriptive titles

Eric Larson's picture

Question: How do you know if the 'title' of your post or video is descriptive enough?

Answer: If you read just the 'title' and you have a 95% chance of being able to tell someone what the contents of that post or video is about. 

Example: "Lesson 4 Ex 2 Bree", I would guess that this has something to do with Lesson 4 Exercise #2 and a dog named Bree or maybe a student with the username Bree

Remember that someone else maybe subitting something very similar, so that extra little piece of information in the title can make all the difference in the world. 

Try to keep the same "format" for your titles. This makes it easy for the computer to sort, index and search.

Example:

"Student Video lesson 18 # 4 session3 Bailey"

"Studen Video Lesson 18 #4 Bailey session 2"

Now these are nice and descriptive, a human could figure out what they mean. But the inconsistencies between them make it very difficult for a computer who takes everything literally.

Looking at it closely there are a ton of difference, and I'll list them

captialization: "lesson" - "Lesson" the computer will index these separately

extra spacing: "# 4" and "#4" the computer will index these separately 

spacing again: "session3" "session 2" same problem

order: "session3 Bailey" "Bailey session 2" totally different to the computer 

With a little extra care taken, we can make nice descriptive titles that the computer can index accurately.Â