In a recent Google SEO Office-hours hangout, a member of the audience asked John Mueller, a search advocate at Google, what the best title tag length for search engine optimisation (SEO) is, and whether the length of title tags would affect a website’s performance on search engines.
Google guidelines state that the best title tag length for SEO and ranking is between 60 and 65 characters – this includes letters, spaces and numbers – as this is the general range of characters Google shows on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Google states that any title tags that are longer than the recommended 60 to 65 characters may be shortened or rewritten entirely. Recently, Google has been rewriting title tags that are too short or are not relevant to the content on the page, and you can find out more about this here.
The title tags on your site are a fantastic way to increase clicks from search engines and drive traffic to your site. Furthermore, title tags are also a small ranking factor used by Google, so making sure that every title tag is optimised for your target keywords and is relevant to the searcher’s query can positively affect your search rankings.
Another point to remember is that you will not get penalised by Google having longer title tags that the recommended character length. However, if you can get your title tags within the recommended 60 to 65 characters, this is advised, as it will make sure that your whole title tag is shown in search results.
Here at Engage Web, we make sure that the title tags are optimised for keywords to help increase traffic to your website. To find out more and to discuss our SEO packages, give us a call.
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