The title tag is an HTML element found in the found in the head tag of a page. As its name suggests, this tag includes the title or very brief summary of the content users can expect to find on the page.
A typical title tag:
<title>Your Source For Blue Widgets & Green Widgets | Acme Inc.</title>
The title is used in many places, but perhaps the two main areas of importance are the browser's title bar and the anchor text of your page's snippet on the SERP. Search engines give content in this area perhaps the highest weight of any content area on the page, so it's important that this area is optimized well.
Guidelines for Writing Effective Titles
- Keep title length to 40-70 characters
- Place your most important keywords as early in the title as possible
- Keep your brand name or site name towards the end of the title
- Titles should be natural and human readable, not just comma-separated keyword lists
- Each title should be unique
- For very large sites, consider using programs to automatically create template-based title tags, but make sure these are human readable and make sense
1. Actually, each search engine will truncate at different lengths. Since the search engines with the earliest cutoff is at around 70 characters (Google), it's best practice to keep lengths to this limit so we can be sure the full title shows in all search engines.