Does Length Really Matter?

The age old question of how important is length? Well in terms of your website’s Title Tag and in the context of SEO well it can mean all the difference. In today’s whiteboard Friday post on the SEOmoz blog Cyrus Shepard explains that they recommend your title tag length to be 70 characters max. The main reasoning behind this is that the google results only show 70 characters and thus the user will only see what is in that small part of the title when they are searching. So lets take for example “Pittsburgh malpractice attorney” and type that in to google search.  As you scan down the page of results you will see some title tags with infamous “…” added to the title of their result. That is because there is more than 70 characters in the pages title and google want’s you to know that. Simple enough right?

Now this doesn’t mean that if you go over 70 characters you will be struck with lightening from the google gods and your site will be sent into an SEO hell. It just means be aware of what the user will see. Anything over 70 characters is basically for google’s eyes only and well now your just being a regular old SEO, congratulations.

An Even better reason to keep it short and simple is like Michael Gray mentioned here, Social Media!!!! You want people to be able to re-tweet, like, share, +1 your golden content to their social heart’s content.  Why because it means more exposure for you which means more visitors to your site, which means more natural links, which means higher rankings which means more traffic, which means more business, which means more revenue, which MEANS you get to take that vacation in Maui your wife always wanted.  Long story short, the rule of thumb is length matters, keep it to 70 characters when possible, and know what content has viral possibilities.