Title tags - does their length affect traffic?

[Blue Tongue]

Hi,

I'm working on optimizing a website which used to have very long title tags i.e. 12 words long. Now I’ve reduced it to 7.

It used to be something like this:

Clients website name Ltd - Personal injury solicitors clinical negligence human rights lawyers

And now reads:

Personal injury lawyers - Clients website name solicitors

It looks better but do you think this will lose me a lot of traffic?

Sorry can't disclose actual site.

[The Old Sarge]

I don't see how the length itself would lose you hits. Maybe the choice of words and/or some specific order to the words, but not the number of words.

[roban]

The length is about right. The title tag being the most important tag should contain your business name and some key words or key phrase that you are optimizing for.

[BasicECommerce]

I typically try to keep title tags to about 90 characters because search engines show the page title in the results. But, like The Old Sarge said, its not so much about how many words as it is which words. Make sure they are words that people will search for.

-BEC

[lxguy]

I don't think it will.

[Blue Tongue]

Thanks for all your advice guys!

[jacksan]

The meta tags are a very important part of the HTML code of your web page. The title tag and the meta description and keywords tags should include keywords relevant to the content of the web page they describe.

* The title tags should be between 10-60 characters.

The reason why titles should only be up to 66 characters is that how much Google will read/display the details of your site on SERP. Of course you can still stretch your title up to 100 characters but only up to 66 will be read and displayed.

[vbeal]

Google indexes 150 characters (some say 180 characters) in the title tag, but you must have your keywords placed within the first 60 (some say 65 or 66) characters as that is the character length Google looks at for ranking purpose. You should use both the Primary and Secondary keywords in that first bit of the title. In many cases you might find it better to use the keywords (description) before the business name, unless the name itself is a known brand that people would be searching for. (e.g. Personal injury solicitors clinical negligence human rights lawyers - Company Name.com)

[Bill Engvall]

The TITLE tag should be kept between 60 - 90 characters in length. I've read many conflicting reports on TITLE length, but a good practical guide is Google. In search results, Google currently displays only approximately 65 characters of the title - some engines display more. Keeping this in mind, have the most important keywords at the beginning of your title.

[RegDCP]

Google indexes 150 characters (some say 180 characters) in the title tag, but you must have your keywords placed within the first 60 (some say 65 or 66) characters as that is the character length Google looks at for ranking purpose. You should use both the Primary and Secondary keywords in that first bit of the title. In many cases you might find it better to use the keywords (description) before the business name, unless the name itself is a known brand that people would be searching for. (e.g. Personal injury solicitors clinical negligence human rights lawyers - Company Name.com)

Could not be a better explanation.

One thing I have been wondering is the use of the pipe | to separate the keywords from the brand.
E.G. keyword keyword keyword | Company/Product branding.

In database use, the pipe is an operator which assigns equal value to items on both sides of the |.

[Kennyh1970]

Also, be careful to make title tags relevant to the content, make sure they make sense, and son't use them to stuff keywords. Google is becoming very hot on abuse of keywords throughout a page. It's also very good at deciding whether a title makes sense to a human or is just a list of keywords.

Best advice I've heard: keep it real.

[katedelaney]

Long Title Tags can dilute the impact of your words. Google doesn't know which is your keyword(s) so it will evaluate them in the order they come so that words at the beginning are more imporatant than words at the end, but will evaluate them all. It's quite common to see Title Tags with a lot of non-important words.

So, you want to be very strategic with what you include. I disagree with the poster who said you want to include your business name in the tag. Very rarely would you want to do this because you probably already rank for your business name. Save it for the Description Tag. So, you might have something like this...

Pet Jewelry - Charms, Tags
Pooches Pet Jewelry creates the jewelry your pet deserves and will wear with pride ....

[JPnyc]

page title is the first thingthat bots crawl and it counts heavily upon them, but as mentioned above, over stuffing the title can harm your search engine rankings.

[Notorious1]

I don't think it will.

[JStetson]

I wouldn't overstuff. Just remember to make it compelling for people who see your page in the SERPS to click on it. If it's just keywords, people may skip it.