How long can your header be in number of characters?

[tm4615]

hey all, have hear conflicting information on how many characters in the header you are allowed? i've heard 60, 65, and 70??

what are your thoughts?

thanks!!

[TomRayner]

The general rule of thumb is 70 characters (with spaces).

The reason why there is discrepancy is that Google truncates titles on width, not actual character length. A 'W' is wider than a 'd' and so if you were to have 70 'W's, for some strange reason, the title would be shortened earlier.

If you're feel you're using certain "wide" characters in your titles, maybe they reoccur in your brand name (eg Wesley's Wheels), then 65 characters might be a better number to aim for. Other than that, 70 characters is usually fine.

[tm4615]

thanks tom!!!

[TomRayner]

No problem!

As always, testing things out for yourselves will give the best results, so if you know you have titles nearing the 65-70 length, Google them for yourself to make sure the title is showing up how you like.

[tm4615]

hey tom, one other question, do you think meta tags are a dinosaur these days?

i still think the search engines peek at them if they are relevant to your content?

thoughts?

[TomRayner]

Do you mean meta description or meta keywords?

If meta description, I think it does still have a small benefit to your SEO if optimisted properly, but more importantly the call to action function of it makes it very worth-while. I'd always put a custom one in, rather than let Google/Bing pull one in for me.

As for meta keywords, I think their time has past.

Google says they do not use the tag when deciding where to rank your site. We have to take what Google says with a pinch of salt, but I believe that this is true.

Bing and Yahoo are said to still take the tags into account - although even they admit it's a very small influence to their ranking.

I think why it has been abandoned by many, many sites is because it is a pretty clear give-away to a competitor over what keywords you're trying to target.  All they have to do is look at your source code, look at your meta keywords and then they can see what keywords you might be trying to target.

For me, their time has passed and I don't use them at all when working with clients or on new sites.  I believe I'm in the majority, but you certainly won't harm your site by using them, provided they are not over-optimised.

[StevenHowe]

Just a little tip: If you're planning on playing around with differing titles and character lengths, rather than "change, wait for index, google, check, repeat", you could always use something like Photoshop to check:

Take a screenshot of a SERP with a truncated title, add a guide at the trunc point, match the font in Photoshop and type away until you hit the guide.

This way you can play around with a few titles before you go live with any of them.

[tm4615]

thanks steve!