We’ve shared tips on crafting a good page title several times on SEJ and each time we’ve came to conclusion that it is better to keep it short and concise. But how short should actually be and should it really be short?
A WebmasterWorld discussion tackles this questions looking at various aspects.
- How short? If you want to keep your whole title in SERPs, create a title tag containing fewer than 70 characters including spaces.
- Does title length effect ranking algorithm? Despite the fact that Google cuts off long titles in the SERPs after a certain number of characters (normally 64-70 – depending on your own word breaks), it actually “reads” and takes into account the whole title as we have seen many times that pages with longer titles perform for keyword searches where the search terms were towards the end of the tag;
- Why to keep it short? Having bold search term in the visible part of the title (before the three periods or ellipsis) works rather for clickability than rankings as people are more likely to “scan” and click the title containing the search term in bold. So most important is not to actually keep it short but to add your keywords closer to the beginning (“Keep the most important stuff at the front then trail off into secondary and/or synonymous phrases”).
- Should it really be that short after all? Longer titles may generate more long tail searches – therefore it must be a clever idea to craft a title that consists of more than 70 characters but follow the following formula: [Your primarily keywords go in the first part – Your keyword synonyms and related terms go in the second part].