Posted by Ray White on February 13, 2010 Comments (2)

In the HTML source code of every webpage, there is what is called a title tag. What does the title tag do? It tells the whole world what that web page is all about. Well, it will when you set it up right.

According to w3schools.com, the HTML title tag does the following

• defines a title in the browser toolbar
• provides a title for the page when it is added to favorites
• displays a title for the page in search-engine results

So that means whatever you put between <title> and </title> in your HTML code will show up in three different places.

First, when someone is looking at your page in a browser window, the title will show in the very top bar of the browser window.

Second, when someone bookmarks your webpage, your title is what shows in the list of favorites.

Third, what you put as your title will be the clickable link to your web page in search engine results.

As you can plainly see, you do NOT want to leave your title blank!

So what should you put in your title?

For branding purposes, it would be nice to have your name or business name in there. But don’t stop there. Your title should be unique to that specific page. It should describe the content of the page, so that it is easily identified in a list of bookmarks. It should ideally have some call to action to entice people to click the link in search engine results. Keep it short though. You want the entire title to show wherever it shows up. If you can keep it under 65 characters, including spaces, then kudos to you!