Meta Tag Priorities:- The Site Title Meta Tag

Meta Tag Priorities
The Site Title Meta Tag
The site title tag is the most important meta tag. The site title meta tag is still read and
indexed by all the major engines. How do we know this? Because it appears at the top of
each organic search entry in the search engine results pages. However, some SEOs
dispute whether it is really a meta tag at all – because the information the tag contains is
clearly visible in the top left corner of the blue area surrounding the screen. The
recommendation of RFC 1866, the international standard for HTML, is that the tag
should contain no more than 64 characters, including spaces. There is nothing physically
stopping you exceeding this limit. I have seen some major sites with 150 characters in
this tag. However the typical, browser can only show 70 or so characters and secondly,
and with more characters, the impact of keywords within the tag is progressively diluted.
From my experience the keywords in the early part of the tag carry more weight. I
personally prefer a limit of 50 to 55 characters. Checking the quality of the title meta tag
is the quickest way of assessing whether a site has been optimised.
A key debate, given the character limitations, is whether you should include the
organisation’s name in the title meta tag. Much depends on the names length and whether
it includes desired keywords. My view is that with limited space, you are wasting a
valuable resource if you use your organisation name here.