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
-
Meta Title Tags - Quick question!
Hi all, Our category Meta Title Tags are a little woeful and so I'm in the process of rewriting them. Let's say you have a product for sale.... some inkjet cartridges for a Canon BJ10V printer for example. In an effort to keep things concise I was thinking that for this category I should have the meta title set simply as: 'Canon BJ10V Inkjet Cartridges' and perhaps our company name after this text (and a pipe delimiter) This takes us just under 50 characters which is ideal but doesn't include any real keyword variation and will result in the company name being duplicated at the tail of the title tag on 6,000 odd pages. A large number of my competitors have title tags along the lines of: 'Canon BJ10V Cheap Inkjet Cartridges for Canon BJ-10V Ink Printers' I understand the reasoning behind this but does the variation of keywords compensate for the fact that the title looks spammy (to both humans and Search Engines). What would you do? Keep it clean and concise or stuff the title full of keywords. In the event of the former would you include the company name in each title in the knowledge they would be well under 50 characters without? Thanks for your help.
Technical SEO | | ChrisHolgate1 -
Will Adding Publish Date at end of Page Title for Blog posts Hurt SEO?
I'd like to be able to easily track blog posts by month but in Google reports when you set a date range obviously older blog post still appear and with amount of blog posts we generate without seeing the date in the title it's not obvious what was published and when it was published. For example if a Blog Title was "/dangers-of-sharing-KM-knowledge-01-11-15 would it hurt SEO? The reason is I'd like to have a quick way to know how new posts do each month compared to older content
Technical SEO | | inhouseninja0 -
Impact of changing title and description.
When a site doesn't rank for keywords, is this advisable to keep changing the title, description and other on page factors of a page , say home page, until it ranks? Will that impact on improvement? Or else will it be counted in the negative side?
Technical SEO | | Somanathan0 -
Duplicate Page Title & Content Penalty On Website Tonight Platform
I built my primary website on Website Tonight (WT) five years ago when I was a net newbie and I'm presently new to seomoz. The initial crawl indicated a problem with duplicate page title and duplicate content with my website home page in WT. It turns out that the WT platform makes you assign a file name to your homepage i.e: www.business.com/homepage.html that differs from the www.business.com that you want as your homepage url. Apparently the search engines are recognizing these identical pages as separate and duplicate. I know that the standard answer would be to just do a 301 redirect from the long file name to the short file name - end of story. But WT does not allow you to do 301 redirects and they also do not give you the ability to go into the htaccess file to fix this yourself manually. I spoke to the folks at WT tonight and they claim that they automatically do 301 redirects on the platform. But if this true then why am I getting the error message in seomoz? Does anyone know if this is a problem? If so, does anyone here have a fix? Thanks in advance. Sincerely - Bill in Denver
Technical SEO | | anxietycoach0 -
Best Implementation of a Title Tag
If My Targeted keyword are: Mussoorie Hotels Hotels in Mussoorie Mussoorie Resorts Resorts in Mussoorie What of the below 3 will be the best Title Tag After Panda and Penguine ? Hotels and Resorts in Mussoorie Mussoorie Hotels | Mussoorie Resorts | Luxury Budget & Economical Accommodation in Mussoorie Mussoorie Hotels, Mussoorie Resorts, Hotels in Mussoorie, Resorts in Musoorie please suggest!
Technical SEO | | WildHawk0 -
Using alt-codes such as ? in META title / description
Noticed a search result recently that really caught my eye and certainly stood out among the other 10 results on the page, the META description contained the following snippet: "Learn more about our ★★★★★ rated service..." Any opinions on how using such alt-chars might effect search positioning when used in either the title or description META tags? The starts certainly looked very different to anything else on the page... The claim of 5 star rated service was pretty much accurate so it was genuine and fair to use it...
Technical SEO | | digitalarts0 -
Why crawl error "title missing or empty" when there is already "title and meta desciption" in place?
I've been getting 73 "title missing or empty" warnings from SEOMOZ crawl diagnostic. This is weird as I've installed yoast wordpress seo plugin and all posts do have title and meta description. But why the results here.. can anyone explain what's happening? Thanks!! Here are some of the links that are listed with "title missing, empty". Almost all our blog posts were listed there. http://www.gan4hire.com/blog/2011/are-you-here-for-good/ http://www.gan4hire.com/blog/2011/are-you-socially-awkward/ MaeM3.png TLcD8.png
Technical SEO | | JasonDGreat0 -
How to resolve duplicate content and title errors?
Hello, I'm new to this resource and SEO. I have taken the time to read other posts but am not entirely sure about the best way to resolve the issues I am experiencing and so am hoping for a helpful hand. My site diagnostics advise me that most of my errors relate to duplicate content and duplicate page titles. Most of these errors seem to relate to our ecommerce product pages. A little about us first, we manufacture and retail over the internet our own line of unique products which can only be purchased through our website. So it’s not so important to make our product pages stand out from competitors. An example of one of our product pages can be found here: http://www.nabru.co.uk/product/Sui+2X2+Corner+Sofa In terms of SEO we are focusing on improving the rankings of our category pages which compete much more with our competitors, but would also like our product pages to be found via a google search for those potential customers that are at the late stage of a buying cycle. So my question: Whilst it would be good to add more content to the product pages, user reviews, individual product descriptions etc (and have good intentions to do this over time, which unfortunately is limited) is there an easy way to fix the duplicate content issues, ensure our products can be found and ensure that the main focus is on our category pages? Many thanks.
Technical SEO | | jannkuzel0