The HTML <title> element is used to provide a title for an HTML document. The HeadTitle helper allows you to programmatically create and store the title for later retrieval and output. The HeadTitle helper is a concrete implementation of the Placeholder helper. It overrides the toString() method to enforce generating a <title> element, and adds a headTitle() method for quick and easy setting and aggregation of title elements. The signature for that method is headTitle($title, $setType = null); by default, the value is appended to the stack (aggregating title segments) if left at null, but you may also specify either 'PREPEND' (place at top of stack) or 'SET' (overwrite stack). Since setting the aggregating (attach) order on each call to headTitle can be cumbersome, you can set a default attach order by calling setDefaultAttachOrder() which is applied to all headTitle() calls unless you explicitly pass a different attach order as the second parameter. You may specify a title tag at any time. A typical usage would have you setting title segments for each level of depth in your application: site, controller, action, and potentially resource. getRequest(); $this->headTitle($request->getActionName()) ->headTitle($request->getControllerName()); // setting the site in the title; possibly in the layout script: $this->headTitle('Zend Framework'); // setting a separator string for segments: $this->headTitle()->setSeparator(' / '); ]]> When you're finally ready to render the title in your layout script, simply echo the helper: / / Zend Framework --> headTitle() ?> ]]>