Title Tags - Is 70 Characters the Best Practice? - Whiteboard Friday

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[Music] howy SEO Mo welcome to another edition of white board Friday my name is Cyrus I do SEO here at SEO Mo today we're talking about title tag length how long is your title tag for years we've been telling bad title tag joke for years we've been telling people the length of your title tag should be 70 characters or less uh that this is best practices but what does this really mean is it absolutely true and what happens if your title tags are longer than 70 characters for example the title of today's post uh within the meta description is 77 characters not this title but the actual HTML title tag if you look at the source code you'll find that the title tag of today's whiteboard Friday is 77 characters we're actually over the 70 character title tag limit is that bad are we going to go to SEO hell for that uh what what does that mean well recently people have been doing some experiments to see just how many characters Google will index within a title tag uh for years you know we thought it was uh 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 a thousand characters and I'll link to these experiments in the post but does that mean that you should use all 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 SEO Mod's 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 on the first experiment I took 10 post that didn't get a lot of traffic but they were pretty consistent traffic from week to week and I kept the old title tags and I just extended them with relevant keywords up to about 250 uh 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 screenshot in the comments below of the Google analytics it exploded and I got really excited so I tried a second experiment second experiment I tried with existing successful pages that we're already getting a fairly high volume of traffic that we're getting consistent level of traffic every week and on that experiment over about the same 12we period traffic Rose 8% cool but overall sight traffic Rose 9% so it was actually 1% below the site average and for a third experiment I tried again on a completely different site a personal site I changed a few pages uh title tags traffic actually went down over 12we period 11% on that side overall side traffic went down 15% so in one of these experiments the long title tag seem to work really well and the other two it just seemed to be a wash why did this happen but not here I'm going to get to that in a minute now what are the arguments for short title tags the best practices that you always hear about keep it less than 70 characters there are reasons why this is best practices and why we recommend it time and time again the first reason is that Google will only display the first 70 characters in general in their Surs uh after that they're truncated users aren't going to see them so if you're writing charact title tags longer than 70 characters you're basically writing it for the search engines and time and time again we found that if you're doing something specifically for search engines and not for users there's probably not a lot of search engine value in it there might be some but probably not much the second reason is our correlated ranking factors the survey that we perform every couple years um our highest onpage correlation value or keyword specific usage was if it's found if the keyword is found in the first word of the title tag uh that was a 0.09 positive correlation it's not a huge correlation but it was our largest onpage keyword factor and year after year after year when we perform these correlation studies we see a direct correlation between the position of the keyword in the title tag and how important it is in the query so the closer the keyword is to the beginning of of the title tag the more likely it is to be important in the query and you're going to see this time and time again it's very consistent hundreds of web Masters know this from personal experience you want your keywords at the beginning of the title tag to rank for those keywords the further out you do it at 220 characters those keywords aren't going to count for very much now the third reason is kind of new in today's world and that's the rise of social media and Twitter limits characters to 140 characters if you have a 220 character title tag and you're trying to share it on Twitter through automatic tweets or Facebook whatever those those they look spammy they're not sharable uh people don't want to share them shorter tile tags Snappy work really well and for all these reasons and for most of the time we found that longer title tags don't help you we say that less than 70 is best practices now people get confused by what when we say best practices what that means does it mean an absolute rule no it just means best practices works most of the time it's going to it's going to be your best bet all other things being equal uh it's going to be what you want to implement what you want to teach people to do and generally how you want to practice um so what happened here why did this experiment rise 136% well if you remember these were low volume Pages pages that weren't getting a lot of traffic anyway the reason it Rose we suspect is because those title tags were poorly optimized in the first place they didn't match the content when we added a few keywords the end Google interpreted that as hey these these match a little better to the content and that's why it Rose it was a fluke if we would have wrote the title tags better in the first place we could have seen this traffic all along so with this in mind I have some suggestions for your future title tag use and best practices is going to continue to be less than 70 characters so the first rule is always experiment like I said if we would have tried something else if we would have written different title tags in the first place it could have helped us what did it cost us to change those title tags zero if your pages aren't performing well you can always try something different and you should try something different I still see sites all the time uh large e-commerce sites that on a thousands of pages they have uh their brand name you know the first 20 characters of the title tag in places where they shouldn't necessarily do that seom did that for a number of years up and until a few uh months ago so always experiment not too much but always try different things to see what title tags are going to work best for you second is right for users uh here at seom our title tag is the same as the title of our post on our blog because we think it's important to meet users expectations when they see a title tag in the ser and they click through to your page you want them to feel like they've arrived where they thought they were going to arrive so it doesn't always have to match the title of your post but something similar something to make them comfortable and something to talk to the users so third remember to keep your important keywords first putting your key important keywords out here isn't going to help you much unless your titles are so poorly optimized in the first place that you really should rewrite them so put your important keywords they don't always have to be in the very first position but as close to that first position as you can and lastly what happens if your title tag is over 70 characters such as the title tag of today's whiteboard Friday post at 77 don't sweat it in our web app in our pro web app uh if you go over 77 characters we issue a warning it's not an error it's a warning uh we just want you to know that maybe if your title tag is over that limit that it's it might not be the best written title tag you might want to have a look at it but here at we have thousands of title tags that go over the 70 keyword limit and for the most part we're going to be fine best practices means that it's best most of the time but you can go outside of best practices if it if it's warranted but remember experiment try different things out find out what works best for you that's it for today appreciate your comments below thanks everybody