HTML title tag

Last updated on December 15, 2009. Tags: HTML tags, HTML title

The title tag is an HTML tag that provides text in the top bar of the browser window. It tells the user what the site is all about in few words or in one phrase or sentence. It is encoded in the HTML file somewhere between the tags <head> and </head> as follows:

<title>HTML title</title>

For Internet Explorer and Firefox, the text provided by the title tag is located on the top-right of the browser window right after the browser logo and followed by the browser's name (e.g., HTML title - Mozilla Firefox). For Safari, it is located at the top center of the browser.

Browsers that use tabs such as Firefox, Chrome, Safari and the the latest versions of Internet Explorer (IE 7.0 and 8.0) also display the texts enclosed in the title tag in the tabs. Chrome displays this text only in the tab because it has no separate top bar, while Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer display the title text of the active tab in the top bar.

When your webpage appears on search results of any search engine. the text between the title tag is displayed in bigger letters and the one that you need to click to visit the website.

Search engines give high priority to the words that are in title tag. It some cases, it is possible to top the search engine results page by just using the title tag. For example, if the text in your title tag is "green tomatoes", it's is almost guaranteed that your website will top the search engine for keywords "green tomatoes", unless your website is not yet indexed by the search engine, it was banned or there are so many websites competing for keywords "green tomatoes".

If we are to be really strict with our usage of words, the term title tag refers only to the HTML codes <title> and </title>. However, throughout this website, we will use the terms HTML title, HTML title tag or title tag interchangeably to refer to the tags as well as the texts between them.

We will use these terms to avoid confusions with WordPress' post title and page title located within the HTML body (between body tags <body> and </body>), enclosed with header tags (<h1> and </h1>, or <h2> and </h2>) and used as the actual title of the article. In most websites, the HTML title is usually the post title plus the website name; in some websites, the post title comes first before the website name while in others, it's the other way around.

Posted by Greten on February 1, 2009 under Definition, Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML)

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