Page title vs page element

[atrenary]

Hello!

I'm new to SEO as my question would imply.  Can someone show me the difference between a page title and a page element?

Thank you!

[AlanBleiweiss]

Hi Amy

Welcome to the world of SEO!  It can be daunting at times, yet the rewards are amazing.  Especially in how great the community is when you reach out.  So I applaud you for doing that!

Okay so - there are several "elements" that make up SEO.  There are on-site elements, and off-site elements.

On-site elements exist at the code level and within the visibly seen content.

One of these elements is the Page Title (located within the < TITLE > tag at the code level, and the contents of which appear when you're looking at a page in a web browser - the very top bar in the web browser will contain the page Title, if one is provided at the code level for that page.

That Title can also appear within the search engine results - however if search engine's systems determine the Title provided is not truly a best match description of what the page is about, those systems will sometimes generate a different one for use in the search results.

A few other elements include (but are by no means limited to):

• Meta Description
• H1 Tags
• Image "alt" attribute (alternate text description for images)

[atrenary]

Thanks so much, Alan!  When I was reviewing our crawl diagnostics, it shows that we have some issues with our title element being too short.  I was confused as to what this meant and what this was.  I was unable to find a concrete answer or a visual that'd show me what this was referring to.

[KeriMorgret]

In this case, the title element probably means the title tag. Was this with the SEOmoz report? If so, you can send a note via the feedback button at the left of the screen and mention that changing some language could make it a bit less confusing for people.

[atrenary]

Hi Keri!

Yes, this is what was on the seoMOZ report.  Thanks so much for the feedback and suggestion.