Title elements too long - good for SEO?
-
As I was reviewing a client's web pages I noticed that most of the pages have titles that exceed the 70 characters limit.
By looking in more details it seems that Google uses all keywords from this long titles. I wanted to reduce the titles under 70 characters but realised that I may cut some important keywords. By reducing to 70 characters, do you think I can damage the performance?.
-
Thank you Peter.
I appreciate your useful feedback.
-
There is some evidence that keywords beyond 65-70 are read by search engines, but practically speaking, Alan is absolutely right. Every keyword you add dilutes the power of other keywords, and trying to cram in extra keywords is almost never worth the trouble.
The only exception I'd make is if you have auto-generated titles - let's say product names, and those product names are by themselves over 65 characters on rare occasion (1 in 100 products). In that case, I wouldn't worry about it - you could leave a few of those alone without harm.
More often, though, people try to cram in "Product | Category | Sub-category | Brand" and it spins out of control. Shorter titles, focused on the unique keywords for that page, are going to be more effective in 95%+ of cases.
-
Alan is right. Your question reminded me of this relevant WBF. Enjoy! http://www.seomoz.org/blog/title-tags-is-70-characters-the-best-practice-whiteboard-friday
-
no, shorten them to 65, to fit all search engines
http://thatsit.com.au/seo/reports/violation/the-title-is-too-longHaving many keywords means your are diluting them,
the title Keyword gives all its credit to one keyword, but Keyword1 Keyword2 only gives half the credit to each.
Your parents can leave you all their money, but if you have a brother you will only get half.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Keyword SEO
Hi everyone! I am pretty new to SEO so all the help would be great. Does every webpage on our website need a focus keyword for example like tructiepbongda Just to note that I am using Yoast on Wordpress. Many thanks,
Technical SEO | | yenu0 -
Rewrite a good post
Hello I have a blog post from 2015 that is ranking very well on Google but I have a terrible bounce rate of more than 98% for this landing page. This post is bringing 4 more visits than the rest of my website pages so I need to make people stay in the site. I don't want to lose my rankings so my question is: Is it better to modify this post or to write a new post and delete the old one? Thank you
Technical SEO | | seoandromedical0 -
Hello folks :)...Is pop-up a good idea for city selection from SEO perspective?
I manage an e-commerce website which asks a new user for his/her city by throwing up a pop-up. Please check yourself by visiting www.furlenco.com. Will this pop-up have any effect on the seo?
Technical SEO | | Furseo0 -
Title Tags in 2013
For blog posts do you think it is better to use something like "Atlanta Plumbing Company" or "Choosing an Atlanta Plumbing Company" (article title). I have been using the article titles but I think it might be hindering rankings a bit. I use to use the keyword but it seems a bit spammy now. I want to create titles for the readers but rank well too. Any suggestions? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | SeattleJoe0 -
Pager + SEO - Is it possible?
Hi, I am having this issue. I know that pager are not friends with SEO, but I want to know which is the best to do in this situations. for example, I work in a news company, and I have a lot of news pages that are very extensive so I use a pager. Well here I have the problem. suppose that the url is www.mysite.com/news/id/here-comes-the-title When you enter that URL you are viewing the first page that has this meta: title keywords description Now, the problem comes when the user goes to the page 2 of this news article. What I shall do? 1- Change the url to www.mysite.com/news/id/here-comes-the-title-PAGE2 www.mysite.com/news/PAGE2-id/here-comes-the-title www.mysite.com/news/id/PAGE2/here-comes-the-title 2- in the page 2,3,4,5 ... add a meta robot noindex? In the option 2 I think that I am loosing the opportunity to index the body of my article. Is this correct? Thanks
Technical SEO | | informatica8100 -
Videos for SEO & Profits
Hello, I'm in the middle of developing a website that will be a tutorial site for SEO, http://universityofseo.com. My plan is to do video tutorials & blog posts to help entry-level SEOs and SMB Owners to help them become familiarized with SEO through quick and easy to watch videos. I eventually want to turn this into a revenue stream through advertisements. I want to know for both SEO and profit reasons, if I should host the videos on youtube and then embed them on my site, or do something like Bits on the Run / Whistia and put ads in the videos that way? I'm not overly obsessed with monetizing the site, but it would be nice to do it, but first and foremost i'm concerned with optimizing the site, having great and actionable content, then monetizing it. I'd appreciate any help on this matter, Zach
Technical SEO | | Zachary_Russell0 -
How To SEO Mobile Pages?
hello, I have finally put my first foot on the path of trying to learn and understand mobile SEO. I have a few questions regarding mobile SEO and how it works, so please help me out. I use wordpress for my site, and there is a nifty plugin called WP touch http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wptouch/ What it basically does is, it converts your desktop version into a mobile friendly version. I wanted to know that if it does that, does this mean whatever SEO i do for my regular web site gets accomplished for my moible version as well? Another simple question is, if i search for the same term on my mobile phone then on my desktop how different will the SERs be? thanks moz peeps
Technical SEO | | david3050 -
Passing SEO value from a subdomain
Hi Everybody, I have built a website (http://rugby.europcar.ie) which has gone viral and getting huge amounts of traffic world wide. The problem is, all the Facebook shares, tweets and other social traffic is all referencing the subdomain, and now www.europcar.ie where I want to build rankings. What are my best options for referring this ranking power to my main domain? Thanks in advance Ronan
Technical SEO | | notnem0
