Issues

Page Titles: Outside <head>

Pages with a <title> element that is outside of the <head> element in the HTML.

The page <title> should be within the <head> element, or search engines may ignore it. Google will often still recognise the page title even outside of the <head> element, however this should not be relied upon.

How to Analyse in the SEO Spider

View URLs with this issue in the ‘Page Titles’ tab and ‘Outside <head>’ filter, and export all URLs using the ‘Export’ button.

Check to see if there are any ‘Invalid HTML Elements in Head’ under the ‘Validation’ tab, that could be the cause.

If this issue has also been triggered, use our ‘How To Debug Invalid HTML Elements In The Head‘ tutorial to debug.

What Triggers This Issue

This issue is triggered when a page has a <title> element outside of the <head> element in the HTML.

Example:

<!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> ... </head> <title>What Am I Doing Here?</title> <body> ... </body> </html>

How To Fix

Ensure the page <title> element is in the <head> element of a page’s HTML so that browsers can use it at the top of their window, and search engines can use it in scoring.