The HTML Title Tag
The <title> tag is part of the <head> and contains the name of the web page, like so:
<html> <head> <title>My Web Page</title> </head>
The most important thing to understand about the title tag is that it is not part of the viewable web page. The title tag is for other applications, such as:
- It appears in the browser title bar - at the very top of the window. If you look at your browser title bar you should see the name of your browser and the title of this page - "HTML Title Tag".
- If a visitor adds your page to their favourites (bookmarks), the page title is the default name it will give the bookmark.
- Search engines use the page title as the listing name for their results. For example, the page you are reading has search engine listings that look something like this:
| HTML Title Tag The <title> tag is part of the <head> and contains the name of the web page ... the title tag is that it is not part of the viewable web page. ... www.mediacollege.com/internet/html/tag/title.html - 11k - |
Search engines tend to place a lot of importance on the title tag, for obvious reasons - the title is supposed to describe the whole page in a few words. Therefore it's very important to get the title tag right if you want good search engine results. As always though, your primary goal should be relevance and usability for real people.
Length
According to W3C convention, the title tag should be less than 64 characters. There is some argument over the ideal length in regard to search engine optimisation...
- One argument says that you should put lots of keywords in the title to get a better search engine ranking. This is why you'll see many page titles which are ridiculously long, clumsy, or even irrelevant.
- Another argument says that too many keywords causes the title to be diluted and counted less, so that none of the keywords perform well.
Our recommendation is to use titles which are between two and ten words, with a preference for fewer. That is, try to keep the title as short as possible while still retaining all the important descriptive words about the page. We believe this works better for search engines and it certainly works better for people.