Title and Description

Just replied to a post on an seo forum, where some advice was being given for beginners, just thought I would post it here, as we all make this mistake from time to time.

Quote "One for the beginners,

Don't go over these maximums, but stay within 5 below if you cant make it exact.
60 character max for titles
160 max for descriptions"

60 char max for titles??? Hardly good advice for beginners as you say, but i do agree with around 55 chars for visibility!

Lets tell them what they really need to know.

Google has shortened the view of titles over the years, but there really is no need to limit your title to just 60.

As for obtaining the most relevant search terms within the viewable area of search results, that is completely different, as we all know, you may be on the 1st page of google, but if your title and desc look less related than others, the CTR will not justify your position.

When searching for loans for example, a monster keyword, position 4 has a title saying, Lowest bank Rate for 50 years, loans from 5.5% etc

Tesco below have 8.2%, and the ones above, just what you expect to see on any google search result.

While the general public are more rate conscious than ever, unless your user is very lazy and never really used a search engine before, they WILL scan at least the fisrt 6-8 results, most upto bottom of page 2 as you well know.

So you really should drop 10 from the old ways, and now focus on getting your best reason to click, within the first 62, and that includes spaces, as for going over, its not a problem.

Yes I agree that being up there so to speak, will give you masses of traffic, but for the professionals out there who need to pitch to clients already up there, focusing on the sales CTR element will appeal to them.

This may well be a sucking eggs post for some, but as the one i was commenting on was intended for beginners, I had to post

 

Reminds me of the part in the film 'A River Runs Through It' - one of Brad Pitts first & best films, where the preacher sets the boys the task of writing an article, then he crosses big sections out and gets them to rewrite it more succinctly repeatedly until he's happy with the condensed version.

Same with titles & description.

I've also got to agree to a large part with the 60/160 for any site, and to go further to rewrite & rewrite til it's a more powerful 48/120 if at all possible.

S

 

Ha ha, best way.

The good news about the web though, you can keep all your old versions, as long as you make them similar and not the same, all are useable

I prefer a full set of clubs to a half set. But hey each to their own.

 

I think it's really important to get the right terms in the title and description. We always wordtracker our titles to make sure that the terms are the most used. For example we might have 'kids toy safety' but find out that 'childrens toy safety' is far more searched for. This for us is massively important and we use the Wordtracker API to automate this.

We now have around 50,000 pages and have tried short, long, hyphens in URL's (per Matt Cutts) - the lot and nothing makes any demonstrable difference. We even took 1000 pages and optimised for keyword density and monitored over 2 months and the nett result was about the same - some better, some worse.

 

as for the title. you can put like 10 keywords in your title and make in way longer than 60 characters but I think that a page cannot rank well for more than 2 max 3 main keywords. So you can make the title long but it is useless.

 

Use all your major key words for the title and limit it up to 50 chars ( worked for me... ) but I strongly believe getting a page ranked strong for more than 2 key words is a dfifcult task , very difficult task.

 

Use the page TITLE to emphasis your keywords - reel in your clicks using a great description - the description meta tag has no effect on your site ranking in Google, use it to describe what your potential visitor will find and if relevant they will click and browse your site thus confirming to Google the relevancy of your content to the users search term.