A Study of HTML Title Tag Creation Behavior of Academic Web Sites

Abstract

The HTML title tag information should identify and describe exactly what a web page contains. This paper analyzes the Title element and raises a significant question: "Why is the title tag important?" Search engines base search results and page rankings on certain criteria. Among the most important criteria is the presence of the search keywords in the title tag. This research concentrates on exploring the retrieval results of Google in retrieving web pages without the title tag. More than one million of academic web pages are found to be untitled, that is, they have not used the title tag.Keywords: HTML; Metadata; Title tag; Search engine; Universities IntroductionHyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the lingua franca for publishing hypertext on the Web. According to the HTML standard, an HTML page is composed of three parts:(1) a line containing HTML version information, (2) a declarative header section (delimited by the HEAD element), and (3) a BODY, which contains the page's actual content. 1 The HEAD element contains information, also called metadata, about a web page, such as its title, keywords, description, language, and place of publication that may be useful to search engines, and other metadata that are not considered page content. Search engines do not generally consider elements that appear in the HEAD as page content. However, they may make information in the HEAD available to web users through the search process.The TITLE element is situated within the <TITLE> and </TITLE> tags, residing inside the HEAD element. For example, the title of the homepage of the University of Tehran is:

Transcending Library Catalogs: A Comparative Study of Controlled Terms in Library of Congress Subject Headings and User-Generated Tags in LibraryThing for Transgender Books

“…A number of researchers have compared controlled vocabularies with folksonomies (Noruzi 2007;Peterson 2008;Spiteri 2007). Tiffany Smith (2007) has compared tags in LibraryThing with LCSHs by looking at four books to discern whether there was a difference in the efficacy of tags and subject headings for fiction versus non-fiction.…”

“…Librarians and scholars are beginning to examine and the efficacy of including social tagging systems in online public access catalogs (Peterson 2008;Spiteri 2007Spiteri , 2009Noruzi 2007;Dilger and Thompson 2008). Louise Spiteri (2009) investigated sixteen social cataloging Web sites and concluded that the majority of these lack the bibliographic integrity and quality that library catalogs contain, but certain social features of these Social Networking Systems (SNSs), including tagging, could enhance library OPACs.…”

From Web Catalogs to Google: A Retrospective Study of Web Search Engines Sustainable Development

“…The title of a webpage is crucial because it helps users quickly evaluate the content and relevance of a result [69].…”

How Well Are Arabic Websites Archived?

“…• HTML title tag -The HTML title tag is often a good indicator of the language of a webpage's content [17]. We extracted the title tag of each webpage and used the guess-language Python library 6 to determine the language.…”