Length of title tag

[cchebaro]

I have read that a title tag should be no more than 55 characters. I have created a website with a long ulr that contains 33 characters, including the http://www.

I have two questions:

1. Does the suggested number of characters include the http//....

2. If so, is it best then to set up the url  to read without the http://. I have a wordpress website.

Thanks again ( and I appreciated the previous fast response)

[danwebman]

Long complex URL will kill your site if they aren't relevant. Try to keep them as small and relevant to the content as possible.

For instance:

http://www.website.com/This-is-a-story-all-about-dragons-written-in-english-by-dave-nash/1sdfg/34  is terrible

http://www.website.com/Stories-About-Dragons would be much better. Dave Nash isn't known as an author and because your search would more than likely be localised English would be the default, and some systems add codes onto the end or middle of the url, middle is the worst!

As for Title this is what appears in the code as <title>Stories About Dragons</title> most good CMS systems will allow a different Meta Page Title than a Page Title which is usually encapsulated within a H1 tag.

Therefore the URL

http://www.website.com/Stories-About-Dragons (Note Google doesn't like spaces in URLS)

could have a meta title of <title>Stories About Dragons</title>

and a page title of

This is a story all about Dragons

[Linda-Vassily]

Here is a nice Moz Blog post from Peter Meyers on Title Tag Guidelines, including a preview tool.

[The url that shows up is the actual url of the page--it is not like Adwords where you can use a display url; this is different from the title tag.]

[TheeDigital]

The title tag is the meta tag that appears on the tab in a browser. http://moz.com/learn/seo/title-tag

You are confusing this with the url. http://moz.com/learn/seo/url