Title Meta Tag

The title Meta tag is a short description of what your website is about. The title tag is vital for search engines. The text used in the title tag is one of the most important factors in how a search engine may decide to rank your web page. In addition, all major crawlers will use the text of your title tag as the text they use for the title of your page when your site is listed.

The text in the title Meta tag also appears in the top border of someone's browser window when they view the web page. Below, a screen shot of the web browser when CNN is the web page being viewed shows that text used in the title Meta tag from the example also appears in the browser border.

The title tag is also used for the description of your page when someone adds it to their "Favorites" or "Bookmarks" lists. For instance, if you added CNN to your Favorites in Internet Explorer, it would show up like this:

When determining your title tag, think about the key words or phrases you'd like to convey to crawler-based search engines, then incorporate those terms into your title Meta tag. Remember though that the title Meta tag should not be a listing of keywords. Rather, think about how you would briefly describe your site to someone unfamiliar with it.