HTML Title Guidelines

Place your title in the HEAD of your document

The title element should be placed in the HEAD rather than the BODY of the document. Some web tools check document content by looking only at the HEAD portion of a document. If you don't place your TITLE in the head of your document, it may not

An HTML document should only have one title

If you are determined to include more than one title in your document (and you don't use any tools to check your HTML), nothing will stop you. But you will confuse the browser that tries to interpret your document. Since most browsers can only display one title, including more than one title will cause unpredictable results. Make things easy on yourself and only define one title.

Note about Netscape & TITLE. There was a "feature" in version 1.* of Netscape Navigator that would allow multiple titles to be displayed successively in the title bar. Some people used this feature to create scrolling titles by including multiple title tags in their documents. For example:

<TITLE>H<\TITLE>
<TITLE>He<\TITLE>
<TITLE>Hel<\TITLE>
<TITLE>Hell<\TITLE>
<TITLE>Hello<\TITLE>

This feature has been corrected in version 2 and above of Netscape Navigator, so writers that tried to take advantage of it are now stuck with documents that have lots of extraneous title tags. Also since newer versions of Netscape only display whatever is in the first TITLE tag, these people are also stuck with one-letter titles. The moral of this story? Avoid browser-specific HTML tags and features.

Use descriptive titles

Titles are used by many browsers to set the name of bookmarks, and are also used by some Web indexing programs.

Keep titles short

Titles should provide a clear description of the document, yet not be too long to fit into the space most browsers allocate for them. A general guideline is to keep your title under 64 characters in length.

Do not place any markup tags in a title

Browsers will not not know what to do with markup tags in a title. Some browsers may display the tag itself, while others may drop out the section of text in the tag.

Notice that this document blantantly ignores all of the guidelines we've mentioned here, so that you can see what happens. For example, if you're looking at this document with a browser, you will only see one title. There are actually two titles defined in the HTML source. Take a look at the source and see. Also check and see what happened to the header tags surrounding the words Long Title. Some browsers display them as tags, while others ignore them. Remember - you can't use any tags within a title.