It’s often pretty difficult to make a short title for a webpage that offers a lot of varied or super-specific information. At SEOmoz, we say that the best practice for title tag length is to keep titles under 70 characters. That’s pretty pithy considering that the title also includes your site or brand name, spaces, and other nondescript characters. So, does it matter if you go over 70 characters? How important is it to strictly adhere to this best practice? Cyrus Shepard does SEO for us here at SEOmoz, and he’ll answer that very question in this week’s Whiteboard Friday. Think title tags could or should be longer? Shorter? Let us know in the comments below.

Video Transcription

Well, recently people have been doing some experiments to see just how many characters Google will index within a title tag. For years, we thought it  was 70s. It’s fluctuated. But recent experiments have shown that Google will index anywhere between 150, one person even showed that they will index over 1,000 characters, and I will link to these experiments in Holding, Investment Offices Email List the post. But does this mean that you should use all of those characters to your advantage? Can you use them to your advantage? Well, I got really curious about this. So I decided to perform some experiments here on the SEOmoz blog with super long title tags. We’re talking extreme title tags, like 200 characters long, 250 characters long, just blew them out of the water just to see what would happen.

Experiments On the first experiment

I took 10 posts that did not get a lot DW Leads of traffic, but they were pretty consistent traffic from week to week. I kept the old title tags and I just extended Dd Leads them with relevant keywords up to about 250 characters long. The results blew me away. In that first experiment, my traffic, over about a 12-week period, rose 136%. You can see, I’ll try to include a screen shot in the comments below of the Google Analytics. It exploded. I got really excited. So, I tried a second experiment. (Correction, the experiment took place over a 6 week period, not 12 like I stated in the video.