How long can your header be in number of characters?
-
hey all, have hear conflicting information on how many characters in the header you are allowed? i've heard 60, 65, and 70??
what are your thoughts?
thanks!!
-
thanks steve!
-
Just a little tip: If you're planning on playing around with differing titles and character lengths, rather than "change, wait for index, google, check, repeat", you could always use something like Photoshop to check:
Take a screenshot of a SERP with a truncated title, add a guide at the trunc point, match the font in Photoshop and type away until you hit the guide.
This way you can play around with a few titles before you go live with any of them.
-
Do you mean meta description or meta keywords?
If meta description, I think it does still have a small benefit to your SEO if optimisted properly, but more importantly the call to action function of it makes it very worth-while. I'd always put a custom one in, rather than let Google/Bing pull one in for me.
As for meta keywords, I think their time has past.
Google says they do not use the tag when deciding where to rank your site. We have to take what Google says with a pinch of salt, but I believe that this is true.
Bing and Yahoo are said to still take the tags into account - although even they admit it's a very small influence to their ranking.
I think why it has been abandoned by many, many sites is because it is a pretty clear give-away to a competitor over what keywords you're trying to target. All they have to do is look at your source code, look at your meta keywords and then they can see what keywords you might be trying to target.
For me, their time has passed and I don't use them at all when working with clients or on new sites. I believe I'm in the majority, but you certainly won't harm your site by using them, provided they are not over-optimised.
-
hey tom, one other question, do you think meta tags are a dinosaur these days?
i still think the search engines peek at them if they are relevant to your content?
thoughts?
-
No problem!
As always, testing things out for yourselves will give the best results, so if you know you have titles nearing the 65-70 length, Google them for yourself to make sure the title is showing up how you like.
-
thanks tom!!!
-
The general rule of thumb is 70 characters (with spaces).
The reason why there is discrepancy is that Google truncates titles on width, not actual character length. A 'W' is wider than a 'd' and so if you were to have 70 'W's, for some strange reason, the title would be shortened earlier.
If you're feel you're using certain "wide" characters in your titles, maybe they reoccur in your brand name (eg Wesley's Wheels), then 65 characters might be a better number to aim for. Other than that, 70 characters is usually fine.
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
-
Can I use schema markup for my Trustpilot results?
Hi we have excellent Trustpilot reviews & want to know if we can include these in schema markup in order for the results to show in SERPs? The Trustpilot results show in PPC but not SERPs. A competitor looks to have no Trustpilot or other independent reviews but is showing 5 stars in SERPs, i also cant find any customer reviews on their site, it looks to be just coding that is driving the SERPs view? Their site is goldencharter.co.uk Any thoughts much appreciated Thanks Ash
Algorithm Updates | | AshShep11 -
Did Google update the length of characters allowed in Meta Description?
Hey all, I do SEO. I'm currently working with another SEO firm on a project. The lady mentioned to me that Google recently updated (couple months ago) and changed their font causing them to lower the meta description to 55 characters. Is this true? I have not heard of this. Could she be confusing the meta description with the title tag? I didn't know Google could have even update the Title tag too.
Algorithm Updates | | ColeLusby0 -
Can I only submit a reconsideration request if I have a penalty?
Hey guys, One of the sites I'm looking after took a hit with their rankings (particularly for one keyword that went from 6/7 to 50+) post-Penguin in May. Although, after cleaning-up the link profile somewhat we started to see some slow and steady progression in positions. The keyword that dropped to 50+ was moving upwards in advance of 20. However, a couple of weeks back, the keyword in question took another slide towards 35-40. I therefore wondered whether it would be best to submit a reconsideration request - even though the site did not receive a manual penalty. The website has a DA of 40 which more than matches a lot of the competitor websites that are ranking on first page for the aforementioned keyword. At this stage, I would have expected the site to have returned to its original ranking - four-and-a-half months after Penguin - but it hasn't. So a reconsideration request seemed logical. That said, when I came to go through the process on Webmaster Tools I was unable to find the option! Has it now been removed for sites that don't receive manual penalties?
Algorithm Updates | | Webrevolve1 -
How can I tell Google two sites are non-competing?
We have two sites, both English language. One is a .ca and the other is a .com, I am worried that they are hurting one another in the search results. I'd like to obviously direct google.ca towards the .ca domain and .com towards the .com domain and let Google know they are connected sites, non-competing.
Algorithm Updates | | absoauto0 -
Can a google data refresh knock your pages out of the rankings?
I see that around mid November 2013 a handful of my sites pages dropped off of Google completely. It was around the data refreshes in November, and while everyone says it doesn't effect that much I was wondering if anyone knew if it could knock some of my pages out of the rankings for a specific keyword. Note - we had previously held muliple listings for different pages on our site for this particular keyword. Google kept the highest ranking and knocked the lower ones off. See attached image of our keyword ranking history to see what I mean. DcJJM0M
Algorithm Updates | | franchisesolutions0 -
How long does it take for a new website to start showing in the SERP'S
I launched my website about 6 weeks ago. It was indexed fairly quickly. But it is not showing up in the Google SERP. I did do the on page SEO and followed the best practise's for my website. I have also been checking webmaster tools and it tells me that there is no errors with my site. I also ran it through the seomoz on page seo analyzer and again no real big issues. According to seomoz I had 1 duplicate content issue with my blog posts, which i corrected. I understand it takes some time, but any ideas of how much time? And f.y.i it's a Canadian website. So it should be a lot easier to rank as well. Could my site be caught in the Google 'sandbox effect' ? Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated.
Algorithm Updates | | CurtCarroll0 -
In the body of index page i want to be able to add text that can be picked up by crawlers but I do not want these text to be visible? How can I code this?
in the body of index page i want to be able to add text that can be picked up by crawlers but I do not want these text to be visible? How can I code this?
Algorithm Updates | | FinindDesign0 -
Is there a utility that can tell me what keywords my site already ranks high for?
Ok... so I'm looking for a way to understand what my site already ranks high for.. I don't necessarily want to have to manually type in keywords. The purpose of this exercise is to demonstrate to a client what keywords they're already ranking high for. Is there an easy way / tool to go about doing this? Thanks in advance, Gene
Algorithm Updates | | BGroup0