Hi guys,
Is there a problem when I make my page titles different from my file names?
And what is the maximum size of the page titles?
My client wants long titles with full descriptions of there services in it.
Thx
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On Mar 19, 2014, at 4:20 PM, Erik wrote:
Hi guys,
Is there a problem when I make my page titles different from my file names?
None. You should try to put some of the same keywords in the filename as you do the title, and separate these by dashes (not underscores) so Google treats them as separate words.
And what is the maximum size of the page titles?
Try to keep it under 200 characters (including spaces). No real reason for this except that it tends to look junky if they are too long, also in a browser that does tabs (most do, now) your title will be severely truncated and you may only get the first word or two to show before the ellipsis.
My client wants long titles with full descriptions of there services in it.
That’s a nice idea for SEO reasons. Your page title is second only to your domain name for absolute power in search engine mojo.
Walter
Thx
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Walter, do you recall how many characters Google truncates the page title to?
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I wasn’t talking about Google per se, but rather the browser’s limited real estate in the title area of the window. I’d be interested to know if Google does truncate the title string for any reason.
Walter
On Mar 19, 2014, at 4:56 PM, RavenManiac wrote:
Walter, do you recall how many characters Google truncates the page title to?
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Thx guys!
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They typically seem to truncate the page title somewhere around the 65th character.
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I wasn’t talking about Google per se, but rather the browser’s limited
real estate in the title area of the window. I’d be interested to know if
Google does truncate the title string for any reason.
I don’t know for certain, but in my experience, you can see in the SERP
results how Google truncates page titles. Yes, you can make them long, but
only the first several words will show. This isn’t due to anything like
character length, but is a measure of formatting space.
Google may read the entire title, and maybe they will weight results
because of it, I don’t know. But People - human beings - will only be
served a few words of the beginning of the title… and If you don’t make
those first words relevant for human readers and win their choice to click
your result, then as far as I know your long and keyword-laden title gets
you absolutely nowhere. I don’t even know why Google would weight it
favorably as it looks and sounds spammy and manipulative to me.
My experience with SERP and the description meta tag has yielded
interesting results. In my understanding, Google only looks at the
description meta tag after scraping the page for an idea of what the page
is about. In some cases, Google will rely on the description tag when there
isn’t enough relevant page content. Other cases, Google may just use the
description tag to validate it’s own idea what the page is about - or maybe
how honest you are about the page content, who knows. I try hard to use
short descriptive sentences that use words and phrases from the page
content in as natural a way as possible.
All that to say that, on pages where the description WAY exceeds the
so-called character count, Google seems to fish around inside the
description meta tag for sentences to fill the SERP description - in other
words, sometimes it starts with the first sentence, displaying as long as
there is space - then other times starting at another sentence within the
tag. Seemingly at random, but always at the beginning of a sentence. I like
this behavior - with the SERP not always repeating the same thing but
sounding very honest and human, giving humans perhaps a better incentive to
click through.
–
–
Ernie Simpson
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Ernie, you’re always teaching me something new. 
For those who don’t know:
SERP = Search Engine Results Page
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