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<title> tag
The most important indexing feature in html. To be placed as early in the code as possible, ideally immediately after <html> tag and <head> tag
A meaningful, helpful and descriptive title tag is an aid to navigation, a user benefit, assists text readers and voice synthesisers, and hence visually impaired users. It also provides ease of access to search engines.
The <title> tag should be used to describe the page or section and should not merely repeat the same wording on every page and section.
Avoid starting a <title> tag with "Welcome to.." or "Home page of.."
Always use meaningful, helpful and descriptive text.
If possible, and only if it does not make nonsense out of the wording, make the first word of the tag string the most important keyword, the second word the second most important and, ideally, the first two words an important phrase.
Hence, taking the above, an example of good practice would be:
<title>Discount Travel - for cheap flights to European destinations</title>
And an example of poor practice would be:
<title>Welcome to the home page of Discount Travel Ltd</title>
The reason being that any search engine algorithm would identify in the first example, the phrase "Discount Travel" and the words "discount" and "travel" as being the most significant and, in the second example "welcome" and "to".
And finally - and MOST importantly:
Use <title> tags to describe each page of a site by reference to the information content of the page being indexed, not the site - ie do not repeat the same title, description and keyword combinations on every page throughout the site.
The purpose of html meta information is to aid non-sequential searching by reference to key words and phrases found in the content of any page. It does not work if the key data is identical on every page throughout. This is particularly important given that visitors do not always arrive on the home page and may be looking for information more specific than can usually be found on a home page.
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