Bold Tags in the Title?

[Tonearm]

I've always thought HTML in the title tag was a bit amateurish, and I know I've seen it displayed raw in some browsers. However, I just noticed that almost all the top dogs for the 5 search terms I checked are using <b>keyword</b> in the title. I guess that's OK now?

- Grant

[g1smd]

HTML for the <title> tag isn't rendered by the browser (it is effectively just meta data not user content), so yes it will look broken once visitors reach the page.

I am sure that search engines take no notice of extra junk like that. Personally, I'd knock a site that uses it down a few places just for trying way too hard.

[seaboy]

Are you sure this isn't just Google's displaying? Ie if you search for 'blue widgets' Google will bold those words if they appear in the page title.

[Tonearm]

seaboy you are right on. I was actually playing with the Google API and Google returns the titles with bold tags around the terms that were searched for. Thanks guys!

- Grant

[mrMister]

I'd be careful with that. I remember when google used to display arrows in the title (It was a specific unicode character). I tried it out on a small site and it didn't take long before Google caught on to the trick and the site dropped in the rankings for it.