Different Title and Meta Title Tag

[rching]

Do the search engines rank based on the meta title tag or the title tag?

What if you have a different meta title tag from the title tag?

Edited:

I have edited to clarify my issue. Having a different meta title tag from the title tag.

Thank you for those who have answered the question so far.

[igor.pinchevskiy]

Search engines consider your title tag one of the main factors when crawling your site. There are a few different meta tags so I'm not sure which one you're referring to, however if you're talking about meta description then this one should be different but targeting the same keywords as you have in your title tag. If you make them identical it will look suspicious to a search engine. Take a look at Google's SEO starter guide:

http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en//webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

Pages 3-5 talks about Title and Meta description,

also take a look at SEOMoz beginner's guide:

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

Also SEOMoz cheat sheet:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-sheet

[SEODinosaur]

Search engines look at your: URL / title tag / H1 / Body  but do not place your exact keyword in each of these because that is over optimizing.

If you keyword is "blue cheese" your title can be "blue cheese is my favorite dressing."

As far as meta description: this does not help SEO with spiders however having your keyword within this will result in having that term bold when searched.

Meta keywords are outdated, Google does nor count them and Bing consideres this a form of spam. Also having meta keywords will givre your competition your terms.

Just use this tool: http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization/new

I would recommend focusing on one keyword per page. Two max..

[rching]

Thank you all, I was referring to different title tag and meta title tag

Thanks,

Raymond

[GeorgeAndrews]

Hello ASMC, I believe you are asking whether search engines look at the title tag

<title>This is the title</title>

or if they look at a meta title tag

The answer is that search engines look for the first example, the title tag. The second example is not a normal meta tag and does not need to be used.

I hope this answers your question.

[rching]

Interesting. Thanks!