Is a Shorter Page Title Better?

[nwright]

Is there any evidence that SEs give a greater weighting to keyword phrases in the page title if there are less characters?

For example:

1. "Buy Silver Bullion"

2. "Buy Silver Bullion Coins Bars Rounds Easily Privately Securely"

The key phrase I am trying to optimize for is "Buy Silver Bullion."

To my knowledge, current practices would say the 2nd phrase is better optimized since it contains more keywords and it has a few USPs.

But is there any evidence that the 1st example would be higher ranked in google for the phrase "Buy Silver Bullion" because it is more focused than the 2nd?

[bradkrussell]

As long as the targeted phrase is included in the page title and close to the beginning of the title, that's fine.

I would lean towards the 2nd page title, but that particular title looks a bit spammy/unreadable (remember, your page title isn't just for SEO, it's to influence people in the SERPs and get higher click throughs). Try something like:

Buy Silver Bullion & Silver Bars Securely | Company Name

[SaforwebDesign]

Good response bradkrusell... the most important thing is your clients can read and understand your title on SERPs, and that title can not seem like a spam. Thumb up for you...

[RuthBurrReedy]

A longer page title is certainly ok - although, as the other answers noted, yours is pretty unreadable by humans.  Too many keywords in a title tag can make your page look "over-optimized" and have a negative effect - not to mention that users are less likely to click on an unattractive tag.  I would advise targeting a maximum of 2 keywords in a title tag.

WIth Google's recent updates it's becoming more important to have a tag that's not TOO long, though.  Title tags longer than about 68 characters (including spaces) may be automatically shortened by Google - or Google may choose to use different text from the page altogether in place of the title tag.  This can make for some pretty weird results since Google's auto-inserted text isn't always as nice of a user experience as your hand-crafted tag.  So make sure your tags are shorter than 68 characters so as not to get truncated.

[nwright]

Your point is well taken. While technically the 2nd page title is a sentence, it would appear spammy to the user. Thus leading to a lower CTR, and then to a lower ranking overall.

Thanks for your advice,

[nwright]

The 2nd title is certainly over optimized. I gave it as an example, but it's not the main point.

My main discussion question is if a short title tag would have better rankings over a long title tag. Here's the logic.

The SE's really care about what is in the far left of the title tag. As you move further to the right the less the search engine cares about it. Other key phrases would have diminishing returns the farther right you get. If you are only optimizing for one key phrase it would, by default, be located in the far left of the title tag.

Would this short title tag then have a higher CTR? Would users see this shorter title tag as more direct and trustworthy because it does not look spammy.

A higher click through rate would then have a positive impact on SERPs (as it is believed to be factored into the overal results algorithm).

Also, as an unknown factor, is there any evidence that SE's weighs a page more heavily if it is optimized for one key phrase rather than a few?

Have any tests been done optimizing for just 1 phrase in the Title Tag to measure CTR?

If the above points are true, then it would we a cost/benefit analysis of whether a higher CTR is worth not having extra key phrases targeted after your primary key phrase.

[RuthBurrReedy]

For the phrase that begins the title tag, I don't think having more terms in the tag is going to affect rankings for that phrase one way or another.  For any additional phrases in the tag, whether or not the page ranks for the phrase is also going to depend on how the phrase is used on-page, but I agree that they usually have diminishing returns rankings-wise.

As for testing one phrase vs. multiple phrases and their effect on CTR and rankings...sounds like a great YOUMoz post to me!