Difference between <meta name="title"> tag and <title></title> tag

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21076201

  •  27-09-2022
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Question

Please clarify what is the difference between <meta name="title"> tag and <title></title> tag.

<title>Page title</title>
<meta name="title" content="Page title">

If both are used, which is most prioritised?

I observed some sites that have both <meta name="title"> and <title></title> tags and both are the same, which is expected, please confirm?

If we didn't use <meta name="title"> tag title, would I have any problem regarding SEO?

<head>
<title>Stackoverflow</title>
<meta name="description" content="free source">
<meta name="keywords" content="HTML,CSS,XML,JavaScript">    
</head>
Was it helpful?

Solution

<title> is a required element on any HTML page to be valid markup, and will be what is displayed as the page title in your browser's tab/window title. For instance, try inputting the following markup into the W3C Markup Validator (via "Direct Input"):

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head></head>
    <body></body>
</html>

This will produce an error that there is no instance of <title> in <head>.

The <meta name="title" content="page-title"> element is just that -- metadata about your page, that any client browser or web crawler can use or not use as it wants. Whether it is used or not will depend on the crawler/client in question, as none of them are required to look for or not look for it.

So in short, you should have a <title> element if you want valid markup. The <meta> tag is going to depend on whether you want to provide for crawlers/clients, and you'd probably have to check documentation for if a particular crawler uses it.

OTHER TIPS

The first is to display page name.

<title> This will be displayed in the title bar of your Browser. </title>

Second is for crawling.

<meta name="title" content="Whatever you type in here will be displayed on search engines.">

The <title> tag will actually display the page name at the top of the page. The <meta> tag, while used for crawling, could be omitted and the page still should crawl over the <title> tag. I think you could just stick with the <title> tag if you wanted.

I have noticed that for some blog sites google will use 

<meta name="description"

for a general description of the site.

So, if you have a blog site where the home page also shows the latest blog post you don't want the site description to be the same as the blog post name defined in

So I'd try meta description for an overview and 

<title>

for specific content.

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