Linda Jenkinson Web Content Design

One of my pet peeves is the misuse of words and one of the biggest ones is the “title tag.” The phrase title tag is such a misnomer. There is no such thing as a title tag. There is the title element that goes in the head section of your page and the title attribute that is meant to describe where a link will take your visitor.

I really hate clicking on an external link when I don’t mean to leave the site, just as much as I hate the Wikipedia text links that take me to information that is neither need to know or nice to know. Use title attributes to tell your visitors where contextual links lead them. For example:

<a href=”http://web-content-designer.com/blog/writing-web-content/title-tag/” title=”proper use of the title element and attribute”> A Rant: The Title Tag</a>

Keep your titles short and to the point. If you create a title that’s relative to your content, it will naturally contain a keyword or two. To stuff either the title element or the title attribute with keywords is poor form.

First of all, when users bookmark your page, it’s the title element that appears in their bookmarks folder. I bookmark a lot of pages and its really annoying when I have to weed through keyword garbage to find what interested me in the page enough to bookmark it.

Moreover, I think you get more clicks on your contextual links if your users don’t have to worry they will end up lost in a cyberspace black hole.

So, keep your title elements and attributes short and to the point–pointing your visitors in the right direction… and please, don’t call either of them “title tags“.