Is the meta type="title" tag needed and what's the best format for the title tag?

Question

I have seen some websites use the following tag:

<meta type="title" content="Title of the page" />

Is it needed when you have a <title>?

Also, what's the best formatting for a page title? Some ideas:

• Page Description :: Company Name
• Page Description - Company Name
• Page Description <> Company Name
• Company Name: Page Description
• ...

Does it matter to Google/Yahoo/etc? Do you include the company name or a general description of the site in the title on every page?

Answer 1

Search engines often ignore meta tags as in the past they where used for spamming purposes. The best tag for title is precisely <title>.

As the best formatting for the title there is no best recipe, but instead try to make the title as descriptive as possible of the real contents of the page.

Answer 2

Meta Robots: This tag enjoys full support, but you only need it if you DO NOT want your pages indexed.

Meta Description: This tag enjoys much support, and it is well worth using.

Meta Keywords: This tag is only supported by some major crawlers and probably isn't worth the time to implement.

Meta Else: Any other meta tag you see is ignored by the major crawlers, though they may be used by specialized search engines.

Answer 3

is what you want to use, because it stands out more than meta tags to most search engines.

My suggestion is to put the keywords that matter first, and avoid repeating the name of your business other than on the homepage, because this only serves to dilute the value of the title text.

Answer 4

The <meta type="title"> tag has little rank or relevance to search engine crawlers. The good old <title> tag is far and away the most important element of a good web page.

As for the format of the title, I think there is good advice in this article at Standards Schmandards:

If the title contains the name of the site, the name of the site should be placed at the end of the title. This makes sure that multiple bookmarks from the same site are easy to browse through in the bookmarks folder and listeners to your page get the most important information first.

I would highly suggest that you do include the company name or site name at the end of each title because:

1. Consistency is always a good idea.
2. Newer browsers like Firefox 3 allow you to search your history and bookmarks by page titles, so users can easily get a view of all the pages they've visited on your site by simply typing in your company name or site name.
3. People that use screen readers will have no idea what website they are visiting if it isn't listed somewhere on the page.

However, I would not put a description of the site anywhere but on the home page because that would make the title unnecessarily long and would frustrate screen reader users because they would have to make an extra effort to skip that information on every page they visit.

If you do decide to put the company name in your title, keep these things in mind (also from Standards Schmandards):

• The separator character should be distinct so that users understand that it is a separator. (I.e. it should not appear as part of text items in the title).
• Prime candidates to use as separators are the vertical bar (|), the dot (·) and the dash (-).
• Regardless of the character you pick, it is important to surround it with whitespace. This will aid both sighted visitors and listeners as it will distinguish the character from the title text.

Based on all the information herein, that essentially makes the second example in your question the obvious choice:

<title>
    Page Description - Company Name
</title>