meta title attribute and title tag
Do these both accomplish the same thing? Should you use one or the other? Both?
13 Replies
There is no meta title tag
I think you can put a title attribute on a meta tag, but that's just the global title attribute:
Contains a text representing advisory information related to the element it belongs to. Such information can typically, but not necessarily, be presented to the user as a tooltip.
I know they are two separate things, I see how I wrote it could be confusing.
<meta title="My Cool Page"> will do nothing, where <title>My Cool Page</title> will set the page's title
so yeah, separate, but the first one just isn't a thing
unless I'm misunderstanding what you're asking about?I'm doing a deep dive on the meta tag and came across this: @Jochem
Stack Overflow
Difference between tag and tag
Please clarify what is the difference between <meta name="title"> tag and <title></title> tag.
<title>Page title</title>
<meta name="title" cont...
I'll bet that answer from 2014 is, like a lot of stuff on SO, no longer valid. Note Google's currently documented guidelines regarding meta tags: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/special-tags
Google for Developers
Meta Tags and Attributes that Google Supports | Google Search Centr...
Google supports both page-level meta tags and tag attributes. Explore a list of the special tags that Google Search can support.
There is also zero mention of it in mdn which references the spec
Meta title is good for SEO. If you run lighthouse on your app it ll recommend it along with meta author etc.
Meta title, author and so on.
Improve Your Lighthouse SEO Score | DebugBear
Learn about the SEO category in Lighthouse and what you can do to optimize your SEO score.
A bit more in depth explanation with a quick google search.
Are you sure about that? The site you linked doesn't mention
<meta name="title" or use it in its own code. Instead, it emphasizes the importance of the <title>. Neither do mashable .com, smashingmagazine .com, developer.mozilla .org or w3schools. If I search for "meta name=title" I find several sites focused on SEO which say the "meta title tag" is <title>
I'm inclined to believe Jochem's statement that it's just not a thing.the google search thing you linked lists explicitly exactly which meta tags are used by the crawler, so for SEO anything else is superfluous at best and harmful at worst 🙂
No, you are correct. The meta names I was thinking about was 'description' and 'viewport' ---- not 'author' or 'keywords'.
Sorry if I mislead you and I'm glad I linked you that page as it describes pretty clearly which and what you need.