How long should a title be

Why? Could you explain?

 

I personally try to keep the titles short, but I also write them with my visitors in mind. If that means using a slightly longer title than would be ideal for SEO purposes (such as if the title improves click-throughs and traffic), then so be it.

 

That 65 character limit includes spaces.

 

SEO Importance to be given 1st to title. It should be less than 65 char but if u could place less than 65 char then its the best. Don't ever exceed as if ur keywords are within 65 char or lesser then it would be much better and u can beat ur competitors with 1-2 keywords easily. In the 65 char u can place long tail keywords which is the best which google gives much importance for ex: "New York BPO Services Online" . The best use is to use ur title much lesser than 65 by which u can rank easily on top.


Google guru

 

it was a battle for me thinking about it too. A short title is less cluttered but a long one allows you to capture more keywords. I ended up going for the short title but only time will tell.

 

just let the keyword density of the term you are trying to rank for be no greater than about 33%

 

Many say it sould only contain the keyword(s).

 

10 is good, 20 at most, don't keyword stuff.

 

Add you main targeted keywords in your title and make sure it should not more then 120 character

 

I thins 6~8 is the best.

 

Maximum limit of a title is 65 character

 

long or short, it doesn't matter as long as you are including your targetted keywords in it.

 

The confusion is caused by the need to balance conflicting priorities whilst working within certain constraints such as google's 65 character title display limit. There are advantages to having the title as short as possible and there are other advantages to making it longer, so a trade off is required which will differ from one website to another because of varying keywords, competition etc.

From an SEO point of view, making the title as short as possible will give maximum emphasis to any keywords in that title. This needs to be traded off against the advantage of including several or many keywords in the title.

Then there is the marketing/click through benefit of making the title interesting so that when it does show in the SERPs then users are more likely to open that web page. However, it's no good having a sexy title if you don't show up in the SERPs at all! Again, it's a trade off.

The bottom line is that these factors do matter but the precise application of SEO techniques needs to vary from site to site. The general rule of thumb for the title must be the shorter the better, so choose your keywords with care and try and incorporate them in a sentence that sells.

 

The Brief Is The Title The Good It Looks...

 

It very much depends on what the page/site is targeting.

With a large site (few hundred pages or you've covered the niche) the aim is to cover one or two SERPs per page (no hard rules though) and the length is determined by the SERPs not a set of predetermined number of characters/words to use. If you are aiming for one long tail SERP on a deep content page the best title from an SEO perspective is the actual SERP.

If you are after a SERP like "Red Widgets" best title is "Red Widgets".
If you are after a SERP like "How To Cook Red Widgets" best title is "How To Cook Red Widgets".

After this you take into account your visitor, is the main SERP alone enough information for them to know what they are getting when they read the link (anchor text of a Google link is the title)? If not add extra for the visitor, try to keep it short.

That's what I do with large sites.

With smaller sites you are ideally looking to pull in more traffic per page, if you have 1,000 pages a couple of visitors per day per page = lots of traffic, but a similar approach with a 50 page site is going to result in little traffic.

So with small site I aim to get multiple SERPs per page, that's not to say I don't want multiple SERPs per page on a large site, but with a large site you can spread your targets further, you can target one SERP per page. With a small site this means more keyword in the title, so rather than just-

Page1 "Red Widgets"
Page2 "Blue Widgets"
Page3 "Green Widgets"

for the title of three pages, we might have to use

"Red, blue and green widgets"

For one page.

The problem with this multiple SERPs targeting per page is it means each SERP doesn't get full SEO benefit, your sharing the SEO power of the title for example over multiple SERPs rather than just one. This means you tend to need more link power on a page like this as the on page targeting isn't as good.

I prefer the larger sites, but own a lot of small one

David Law

 

lengthy title is definitly not good. title of web page is important for search engines. sort and unique title will work better.

 

This is a good example
New York BPO Services Online could also be expressed as
New York BPO OnLine Services
Online Services New York

The point is that each one will provide different results.

So you might want to play around with your page titles and experiment to see which is more effective.

This is very important for when you are using Geo-targeting in your titles. Does your user search us the city first or last?

The answer can be found by analyzing your traffic data.

 

Short titles so the keywords in them don't become too diluted.

 

So your are advocating every three word be your keyword, is that correct?

If that is so you might want to read this article where Matt from Google says your keyword only needs to appear 2-3 times.

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/080623-101341

 

Good to see most people have this wrong. The beauty of the web is that there is no set answer - so experiment. Title tags are easy (and free) to change. My experience is to repeat your important keyword phrases (in order) - at least 2 times. Make sure this matches your H tags and copy. There is no penalty for long Title tags - but be sure to put you put important keywords at the beginning of the tag (in order). Use Google Analytics to determine your best converting keywords and make adjustments as you need to. Do not waste you title tags by inserting the name of your company / site, unless it includes the keyword in the name. The title tag is the most important part of SEO. Keep at it until you get it right. Also, capitalization or non-caps is somewhat important - does your search keyword get queried with caps or not? Look what title tags your competitors are using and go from there.