Glossary /On-page & content
Title Tag
The HTML element naming a page, used as its headline in results and as one of the strongest on-page signals of what it covers.
The title tag is the page’s name. It supplies the clickable headline on a results page, the browser tab label, and the default text when someone shares the URL. It is also among the most direct statements a page makes about its own subject, which is why it carries disproportionate weight for such a short string.
Engines rewrite titles when they judge the original a poor fit for the query — commonly when it is stuffed with keywords, padded with boilerplate, or too long to display. A title written for a person, front-loading the distinctive part before any brand suffix, gets rewritten less often.
Every page needs its own. Duplicate titles across a site are one of the clearer signals that pages are interchangeable, which invites exactly the deduplication that keeps them out of the index.