Navigating through the search results of a search engine, you soon realize the importance of the title tag of an HTML document.

What is the title tag meant for?  Essentially, the title tag should identify the content of the document in a fairly wide context.

Why is the title tag so important?

Search engines, especially Google, emphasize the importance of the title tag.  This is extremely evident when you examine “relevant” search results.  Almost always, the top result of a search query has some form of the original query embedded in the title tag.  Ultimately, the title is used by the major search engines as the most important piece of information available to determine the ranking of your page.

In addition, the title of a page is displayed at the top of the browser window. The title acts as a guide to users allowing them to distinguish between different browser windows.

We’ve demonstrated the importance of the title tag, but does that mean we ought to stuff the title tag with as many keywords as we can think of?  No!  Don’t be tempted by falling into the trap of stuffing your title tag with keywords.

In fact, the majority of search engines will truncate the title of your page after x amount of characters.  Andy Beal of Search Engine Guide suggests that pages with long titles might even receive a penalty for stuffing the title tag unnecessarily.

How long should a title be?  An optimum title is less than 67 characters.

1. Google ignores any character(s) after the 66th character
2. Yahoo! ignores any character(s) after the 68th character
3. Live (MSN) ignores any character(s) after the 66th character

The statistics don’t go without saying that title tags should be filled with those keywords that are relevant to your site.  Don’t stuff the title tag for the sake of stuffing it.