Page Title for SEM

Length: Understand the Length of Page Titles

Many sites appear to believe it is important for the name of the site (or company name) to appear on every page of their website, no matter how long the name may be.  While communication theory would suggest this is a good way for people to learn who you are, since they are repeatedly being exposed to the name, from a search engine perspective using the site name in all page titles is squandering potential opportunity.  The opportunity lies in the search traffic that may not come to your page because the keywords, while appearing in the title, are past the point at which some search engines will index.  To see this, do a Google search and examine the results.  If a site’s title is too long Google will display repeated dots (…) at the end.  Without the keywords visible in the viewable title, search engines may not associate the keywords with the site and if the page is listed users will not see the keywords highlighted in response to their search.  For example, if a site’s title includes the phrase “Techniques for Sales Lead Generation” but only “Techniques for Sales” is viewable the site may not benefit from searches that are directly related to what the page is about, namely techniques for generating sales leads.

While a long page title results in lost opportunity because keywords may not be viewable, opportunity can also be lost when a page title does not take advantage of the full title that search engines will recognize.  To take full advantage of what search engines will see, the marketer should spend time to insure the page title utilizes the full space available and contains important keywords that best reflect the page and user search strings.

This discussion raises an obvious question: How long should the title be?  Well, it depends on the search engine.  With Google the current total characters it will show in the title of a site is about 67 which includes blank spaces.  For titles extending past 67 characters Google will cut the remainder and, in fact, will cut the title at the end of the last full word.  MSN search has a similar size limits, though it gives a few more characters while Yahoo appears to be the most generous by displaying over 100 characters.  The basic rule to follow for a site trying to appeal to all search engines is to make sure the most important keywords are within the first 67 characters. 

This brings us back to the point regarding companies placing their name on all page titles.  How much of the valued page title space is the company name consuming?  The longer it is the less opportunity exists for placing important keywords in the page title.  For situations where the company name is long but company execs want the company name on all pages, the website marketer should consider: 1) shortening or abbreviating the name on inside pages, or 2) adding the name to the end of the page title instead of the beginning as in “Keyword Phrase, Keyword Phrase – Company Name”. 

By the way, an easy way to figure out the length of a page title is to copy and paste it into a word processor that contains a word count feature.  In fact, a word processor is probably the best place to create page titles since it also provides spell checking ability.