Across the Stack Exchange network, tags appear before the user-given title of the question inside the HTML <title>
element:
<title>javascript - What does jQuery.fn mean? - Stack Overflow</title>
This typically happens when a relevant tag is not mentioned in the title — beneficial for SERPs. Here it's acceptable that the tag "html" is lower-case, despite the mismatch with "CSS" in the body of the question:
In other cases, the lack of capitalization in tags within the <title>
makes the Stack Exchange search result look "messy" and less curated, for example:
What's the significance?
Folks seeing improper capitalization in SERPs may be less inclined to click. It could seem that a negligent person wrote the question and forgot to capitalize "google analytics". This can consciously or subconsciously signal that other content on SO is poor quality. too.
While this may seem minor (and perhaps it is), continual optimization can be a good way to stay on top and improve click-through rate across the whole Stack Exchange network.
It's not just about Stack Overflow
SO is doing well in terms of visits from organic search, but the same cannot always be said about other, good-quality Stack Exchange sites. In both cases, there's always room for improvement — especially when not that difficult:
- Tags are automatically converted to lower-case.
- Changing to upper-case where appropriate can be crowd-sourced.
Capitalization won't be correct 100% of the time, but it's better than being wrong 100% of the time. Correct capitalization for tags would be:
- HTML
- jQuery
- Google Analytics
- string
- quantitative data
For SERPs, some could be re-written:
String - Question goes here... - Stack Overflow
Quantitative data - Question goes here... - Stack Overflow
Some shouldn't:
jQuery - Question goes here... - Stack Overflow
There's another question at the heart of this: Why weren't tags capitalized to begin with?
<title>
element can dramatically improve click-through rate in organic search results – Baumr Jun 13 '13 at 12:30[HTML]
,[VB.NET]
,[JAVA]
,[GOOGLE-APP-ENGINE]
and[WINDOWS-PHONE-8]
...capitalizing all tags is not an option. – Time Traveling Bobby Jun 13 '13 at 12:34Google-Analytics
,Search-engine-optimization
,HTML
,JavaScript
, etc. – Baumr Jun 13 '13 at 12:35Html
is not correct...there'shtml
closer to being correct...wait, are you still talking about display in the page title, or are you talking about tags in general? – Time Traveling Bobby Jun 13 '13 at 12:36<title>
elements lead to better CTR – Baumr Jun 13 '13 at 12:37HTML
appear in both SERPs and on-site? – Baumr Jun 13 '13 at 12:38[Java]
to[JAVA]
and[JavaScript]
to[JAVAScript]
? That must be one hell of fun! – Time Traveling Bobby Jun 13 '13 at 12:50