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
-
Problems with Meta Title on Bing
On the Bing search engine, it isn't showing the actual meta title we have for a website. It's showing something different. However, the correct meta title is showing on the Google search engine. Has anyone had the same issue? Has anyone been able to fix this issue? Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | Harrison.Stickboy0 -
Bars Verus Hyphens in Title Tags
It has been quite a while since I have seen an article really talk about this and I am wondering if this even matters anymore? I prefer the look of a - rather than a | but just wondering if this is still a thing... If you know of a recent article going into findings on this supporting one or the other it would be appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | DRSearchEngOpt0 -
New Page Showing Up On My Reports w/o Page Title, Words, etc - However, I didn't create it
I have a WordPress site and I was doing a crawl for errors and it is now showing up as of today that this page : https://thinkbiglearnsmart.com/event-registration/?event_id=551&name_of_event=HTML5 CSS3 is new and has no page title, words, etc. I am not even sure where this page or URL came from. I was messing with the robots.txt file to allow some /category/ posts that were being hidden, but I didn't re-allow anything with the above appendages. I just want to make sure that I didn't screw something up that is now going to impact my rankings - this was just a really odd message to come up as I didn't create this page recently - and that shouldnt even be a page accessible to the public. When I edit the page - it is using an Event Espresso (WordPress plugin) shortcode - and I don't want to noindex this page as it is all of my events. Sorry this post is confusing, any help or insight would be appreciated! I am also interested in hiring someone for some hourly consulting work on SEO type issues if anyone has any references. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | webbmason0 -
Duplicate Titles on Wordpress blog pages
Hi, I have an issue where I am getting for duplicate page titles for pages that shouldn't exist. The issue is on the blog index page's (from 0 - 16) and involves the same set of attachment_id for each page, i.e. /blog/page/10/?attachment_id=minack /blog/page/10/?attachment_id=ponyrides /blog/page/11/?attachment_id=minack /blog/page/11/?attachment_id=ponyrides There are 6 attachment_id values (and they are not ID values either) which repeat for every page on the index now what I can't work out is where those 6 links are coming from as on the actual blog index page http://www.bosinver.co.uk/blog/page/10/ there are no links to it and the links just go to blog index page and it ignores the attachment_id value. There is no sitemap.xml file either which I thought might have contained the links. Thanks
Technical SEO | | leapSEO0 -
Some posts not showing on Google search if I seach them using post title?
Hello! Some of my WordPress blog posts aren't showing on the Google search result, even if I type the post title. What could be the issue? Is it my site text selection disabled issue or WordPress SEO by Yoast plug-in issue or something else? Moreover, if I search some of my post text (article content), I can't see relevant post on Google search. I use following code to protect my articles. Is it SEO friendly? .content {
Technical SEO | | Godad
-webkit-user-select: none;
-khtml-user-select: none;
-moz-user-select: none;
-ms-user-select: none;
user-select: none;
} my site:- http://goo.gl/tD2fS Thanks!0 -
Duplicate Page Title Crawl Error Issue
In the last crawl for on of our client websites the duplicate page title and page content numbers were very high. They are reading every page twice. http://www.barefootparadisevacations.com and http://barefootparadisevacations.com are being read as two different pages with the same page title. After the last crawl I used our built in redirect tool to redirect the urls, but the most recent crawl showed the same issue. Is this issue really hurting our rankings and if so, any suggestions on a fix for the problem? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | LoveMyPugs0 -
What's best practice for blog meta titles?
I have the option of placing meta titles on the actual blog, or on the blog category on my site. Should I have separate meta titles for each blog or bundle them under a category and try to drive traffic to the category? Can anyone help with best practice?
Technical SEO | | Lubeman0 -
Unique Title Tags OR Unique Content?
The content management system for my e-commerce site will not allow me to add both: unique content and unique title tags to each of my product category pages. Since I am forced to choose one or the other...which one is more important for rankings? And please dont answer "get a new CM system"...thats not an option. Thanks
Technical SEO | | rcarll0