Title Tag Optimization for Search Engines

Do shorter or longer titles bring you better rankings and traffic?

Much has been written about Google’s display limit of titles. The most common answer you’ll find on the internet is Google’s desktop?display limit is 600 pixels, which typically equals about 50-60 characters.

But the 600-pixel guideline can be misleading for many reasons:

• Over?60% of Google search traffic?is mobile, not desktop
• Mobile search has longer and more varied title lengths, depending on the user’s device
• Even on desktop, the display limit isn’t always 650 pixels
• Google changes this limit with some frequency

There are different scenarios according to SERP's and type of results which define the title tag display limits. Here is a graphic from Zyppy, showing how the title tags differ as per search results:

Takeaway #1: Keeping your title beneath 600 pixels is the best to ensure Google displays your entire title. If the majority of your search traffic comes from mobile, you might choose to ignore this limit.

How Much Of Your Title Will Google Use For Ranking Purposes?

First things first:?Google defines no limit?as to how long your title can be. In fact, they say they actually have a limit, but it’s really, really large.

In fact, experiments have shown Google?indexing titles over 1000 characters.

Takeaway #2: There is no penalty for long title tags. In fact, Google will index the keywords in your title even if it’s really long.

How Does Length Impact Google Rewriting?

Google rewrote?extremely short titles?(those between 1-5 characters long) over 96% of the time. Typically they did this by adding more words to make the title longer.

Medium-length title?tags had the smallest chance of being rewritten by Google. Meta titles 51-55 characters in length were rewritten only around 40% of the time.

On the other end of the spectrum, title tags?over 70 characters?were rewritten nearly 100% of the time, as no title can go over Google’s 650 desktop display limit.

Keep in mind that because Google display limits are longer on mobile, you can expect mobile titles to be rewritten with much less frequency. In fact, it’s entirely possible for Google to display completely different titles on mobile and desktop devices, sometimes with slightly different meanings.

Takeaway #3:?If you want to reduce the chance of Google rewriting your title, your best bet is to?target 51-55 characters.?If your visitors primarily come from mobile, you can typically use longer—but not shorter—titles than this before Google starts rewriting.

Does Title Tag Length Impact Traffic?

A?Backlinko study?of 5 million Google search results showed that titles between 15-40 characters earned a?much higher click-through rate?than longer or shorter titles. The difference was significant too, with titles in the "sweet spot" seeing earning close to?36% more clicks?than those outside the range.

But a higher CTR for specific queries doesn’t necessarily mean more traffic overall, as it’s possible, in theory, for longer titles to rank for more queries overall.

Another study?by the Etsy Engineering team decided to look at how title length impacted overall traffic instead of CTR. Testing 1000s of pages using a strict scientific protocol, they found that shorter title tag variants performed better by earning more clicks overall than longer titles.

Their theory as to why this happens is that shorter titles using focused keywords tend to be more "tightly relevant" (paraphrasing) to the user’s search query.

Takeaway #4:?Every known SEO study to date shows a relationship between short-to-medium titles and higher traffic. While cause and effect aren’t clearly understood and the optimal length isn’t 100% clear, the evidence suggests keeping your titles between 50-60 characters max.

How to check your meta title length?

Fortunately, many SEO tools will automatically calculate title tag length for you. Zyppy will warn you if your titles exceed 600 pixels.

Other preferred options for checking title tag pixel length include:

• Paid: Screaming Frog will calculate the?pixel length of all titles?found in a crawl, which you can easily export.
• Free: Both Paul Shapiro’s?Search Wilderness?and?Climb Marketing?offer bulk title tag pixel counters

What techniques are you implementing to optimize the title tags at your end? Do share in the comments below.