How should I shorten my titles?
-
I've read that page titles can't/shouldn't be more than 70 characters long. Out of around 1,000 products we have about 150 that have legitimate titles that exceed this character limitation. We plan on automatically truncating these. Should I just cut the titles off at 70 characters or should I cut them off and add a "..."? Does it even matter?
-
Thanks Alex, I had a feeling I'd read something about people trying to use multiple-snippets in a single meta-description to try and get relevant descriptions into the serps depending on the keywords used.
A bit too dependant on the whims of google for my liking, and if we're talking about an e-commerce site, then it's enough work generating a single quality description for each product let along multiple ones.
-
"If they are only going to be visible in the SERPS and you know they are going to be cut off then they will never see the words after the cut-off point."
That's not always true, but I see you question it later on - I have seen a few examples where people have used long meta descriptions with the intention of the SERPs displaying something different depending on the search made. Here's one I've just found: http://sharkseo.com/whitehat/meta-descriptions/ - though I've just done a search and I got the same meta description ("Dave is a freelance SEO consultant...") for both suggested searches.
If Google doesn't think your meta description is appropriate there's always a chance they'll replace it with something else on your page or the description from DMOZ.
You should definitely not add the ellipsis yourself, what if the length displayed is changed for example? I'd just ensure your first 155ish characters are well-written in a way that entices users to want to click through.
-
When are the users likely to see the content of meta-descriptions?
If they are only going to be visible in the SERPS and you know they are going to be cut off then they will never see the words after the cut-off point.
Any effort writing these words is going to be wasted.
If these words are important in describing/selling the product then I'd reword the meta-description so that these were before the cut off point.
If you can make your description more concise without losing readability and avoid the cut-off altogether I'd go for that in preference.
I'm not sure if it's worth truncating the descriptions yourself and adding '...' or just letting the search engine do it. Would the search engine ever use a snippet from the middle/end of a meta-description? (perhaps someone else can answer that?)
Are these descriptions automatically generated from the page content?
What do you mean by a little long!?
-
Doug,
Thanks for the advice but that does not answer my question regarding truncating the description meta tag. Do you have any advice there?
Our descriptions are well written and are, of course, geared towards helping the end user. Some of them are a little long though which is why we are considering truncating them and adding a '...'.
Thanks, Alex
-
Again, think about who's going to be reading the meta description and what you want it to do.
I like to think of the meta description (along with the title) as a classified-ad for your page when it is displayed in the SERPS. You want to use the description to help entice searchers to click on your page.
So, make it compelling, put keywords near the front so that they get highlighted, and try to reassure people that they are going to find what they're looking for by clicking on your page. If you can get some benefits in there, then that's even better.
-
Thanks very much for the replies. We'll avoid automatically truncating the title tag.
We are also automatically truncating the description meta tag, and adding '...' to the end if it is longer than 150 characters. Would you recommend not truncating this as well?
-
Definitely don't automatically truncate them. It doesn't matter if they're longer than 70 characters, it just means search engines will show an ellipsis after the 70th character on their results pages. Check out the 'SEO Best Practice' section here: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/title-tag
-
If you want people to click on these snippets in the serps, also remember that you want to make the titles as appealing as possible. It's not just about ranking, but click though too!
I suspect that shorter, more straightforward titles, that closely match the search query, are going to perform better.
Take a look at what Amazon do for example (picked at random!):
Something like this in the H1: "TeckNet NEW Kindle Leather Case / Cover With Magnetic Clasp for NEW Amazon Kindle / 6 inch / 2011 generation / Book Style - Black,TeckNet,MT-183-Black"
changes in the title tag to: "TeckNet NEW Kindle Leather Case: Amazon.co.uk: Electronics"
-
I wouldn't do the simple "cut". You have to redo 850 titles? I say do em manually. Believe me, title tags are THE most important on page factor. Just truncating them won't give you any more SEO. Making them better and < 70 chars will.
Yes it sucks, yes it's a lot of manual shitty work, but it will bring you a lot more SEO wise, than just cutting them to 70 or so chars.
Do some proper research into what people are searching for, put your brand name at the end of the title, etc.
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
-
Duplicate Page Titles For Paginated Topics In Blog
Hello, I've just run a site audit and it has come up with a duplicate title tag issue for the topics section of our blog. For example it is flagging that the following have the same page title. https://blog.companyname.com/topic/topic-name https://blog.companyname.com/topic/topic-name/page/2 How significant is this as an SEO issue and what are the ways we can go about fixing this? I look forward to any suggestions and guidance that can be provided. Thanks, John
Technical SEO | | SEOCT1 -
Duplication in Meta Titles
Hi,
Technical SEO | | ChrisHolgate
In order to appease the Moz crawler we recently changed over 10,000 URL's in order to make our Meta Page Title less than 55 characters as it suggested. Unfortunately our rankings dropped dramatically pretty much overnight so I am getting the feeling that perhaps our titles are now just a little too concise and need elaborating on just a touch. Our competitors that rank well seem to use a small amount of keyword repetition. For example, whereas we may have:
Brother DCP-197C Inkjet Cartridges They will have:
Brother DCP-197C Inkjet Cartridges. Cheap Brother DCP-197C Ink. What are your opinions of the fact that: a) Their Title is over the 55 character figure that is suggested for displaying correctly in the SERPs.
b) The words Brother and DCP-197C are repeated in the title. The fact their title appears to be working better is almost enough to sway me but the competitors title just looks a little too spammy for me to make a sitewide change without asking some second opinions first. Cheers all!0 -
I am looking for the best post and page title template
There seems to be a few schools of thought as to how the title templates in the yoast plugin. currently mine are set with the default templates posts title template (%%title%% %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%) page title template (%%title%% %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%) What are the best options here for proper SEO. I am learning as much as i can but i have searched for a concrete answer here on the net, but found many different responses. What do you all think? What is my best option?
Technical SEO | | donsilvernail0 -
Problem of possible duplicate title tag and description. Help me!
Hi everybody, I'm optimizing this huge website that has a lot of identical categories for differente locations. I'm trying to find a smart way to write title and description for these categories, changing the location as a variable on the title and description phrase. Here some examples: Title: Attractions in [CITY]. Sightseeings, monuments and museums in [CITY]. Description: Find travel ideas and suggestions for [CITY]. On [NAME OF THE WEBSITE] you can find a lot of attractions, monuments and sightseeing off the beaten path in [CITY]. Changing only the name of the CITY on these Titles and Descriptions, am I running the risk of duplicate title and description? Thanks in advance for your help!
Technical SEO | | OptimizedGroup0 -
Duplicate Titles Aren't Actually Duplicate
I am seeing duplicate title errors, but when I go to fix the problem, the titles are not actually identical. Any advice? Becky
Technical SEO | | Becky_Converge0 -
Are duplicate page titles fixed by the canonical tag
Google Web Master Tools is saying that some of my pages have duplicate page titles because of pagination. However, I have implemented the canonical tag on the paginated pages which I thought would keep my site from being penalized for duplicate page titles. Is this correct? Or does canonical tag only relate to duplicate content issues?
Technical SEO | | Santaur0 -
Diagnostics say I'm missing Page titles... but I am not?
I've been running a crawl of one of our new site builds for a couple of weeks. The Diagnostics picked up a couple of issues, which was great, but it's saying we're missing Page Titles and Descriptions on pages that we have Page Titles and Descriptions. Anyone come across this before?
Technical SEO | | niamhomahony0 -
Duplicate titles OK if page don't need to rank well?
I know It is not a good idea to have duplicate titles across a website on pages as Google does not like this. Is it ok to have duplicate titles on pages that aren't being optimised with SERP's in mind? or could this have a negative effect on the pages that are being optimised?
Technical SEO | | iSenseWebSolutions0