HTML - title tag

Here you learn how to code the TITLE tag.

The 'title' tag belongs in the <HEAD> section of your source code and is the first tag after the opening HEAD tag. The information that you put in your title tag will show up in the blue bar in the top blue bar of the window of your web browser. One thing to remember is that sometimes when the backend of your site is powered by a content management system (CMS) or forum, the title tags are automatically created from some input you gave the program earlier.

This example from Wikipedia's profile page of George Clooney shows the title tag "George Clooney - Wikiepedia, the free encyclopedia" in the blue bar of the web browser.

Some beginning webmasters might look at title tags as simply the title of the page but title tags are very important for 2 reasons. The first reason, which most webmasters know about, is to maximize your search engine ranking. A page is more likely to be ranked higher when the search terms are in the title tag. The second reason, which is often overlooked, is because the information from the title tags is the text that shows up in the search engine results page (SERP) so you want your title tag to give Googlebot the most relevant information so that search engine users will be able to identify your page as a page that meets their needs when they scan the search results.

So what should you put in title tags? First, the title should contain keywords (about one to three) describing the subject matter of the page. The exact words you pick should be the search terms that you think search engine users will look for. For example, if you are making a page about Corvettes then your title tag should have the word "Corvette" and not "Vette".

The second thing is that your title tag should contain enough terms to narrow down to the specific subcategory that your page is in. This is for 2 reasons: first you will get a higher ranking on the specific phrase because it will be less competive and secondly the people who are doing the searching are looking for something specific and are more likely to click on a specific page that meets their needs than a page that looks more broad. For example, if you have a page about college football picks then your title tag should be "College football picks" and not "College football". If you look at the number of pages that come up in Google you will see that "College football" has 17.1 million results, while "college football picks" has 195,000 results.

A third thing, and this is optional, is that you may want to consider having the name of your web site in the title tag, especially if your domain name has those search terms in the URL. For example, if your web site is CollegeFootballPicksOnline.com then you may want to have your title tag as "College Football Picks - CollegeFootballPicksOnline.com". If you don't have the keywords in the domain of your website then I would recommend putting the website name in the title tag only if you have a high traffic site which is recognizable. In that case having your site name in the title tag may make more people click on your listing first because they recognize your site as a quality site. In the example below where you have people looking for "George clooney" you can see that Wikipedia has their name in the title tag but IMDB doesn't. If someone is scanning the search engine results looking for a good site about George Clooney then they may see Wikipedia's name and instantly click on them knowing it will be a high quality site. Doing this this doesn't seem to hurt your results - just put the name of your site after the keyword phrase because search engines give more weight to content at the start of your tag. Many times this seems to help ranking by having keywords in the title tag more than once. But don't flood the title tag with the same keywords. If you make a page about Madonna and the title tag is "Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna Madonna." then Google will probably be smart enough to figure out your scam and actually punish you for it. Don't put a keyword in the tag more than twice and if you do have it in there twice don't put it right next to each other.

A few last comments I want to make. First, don't put too many keywords in the title tag because I think it dilutes the effectiveness of them. Second, don't put your title tag in capital letters because it looks bad (FYI: today's search engines are not case-sensitive). And third, another reason to make a descriptive TITLE tag is because that text is what shows up in a users bookmarks. By putting accurate text in there (as well as your website's name) you are lowering the chances he will jut ignore your bookmark or delete it when cleaning out his bookmarks. Below are the search engine results for the phrase "George Clooney" from 3 different strategies of putting different information in the TITLE tag.