How Long

ow does the length of an article’s title affect SEO? What is a good length? What isn’t? For example, Wikipedia can easily rank for single word titles, like gold. But many new websites can not. Considering this, what should be the SEO strategy for new websites? Specifically title length.

So the first thing you need to think about is the length Google will allow in their search results. Moz does a nice job summing up the character length in their post on Title Tags. With a 60 character limit you will want to stay under that so your entire title will show in the results.

With that in mind a good strategy is to use up the space with keywords that are specific and valuable but don’t repeat themselves. You also want to make sure the title matches your content well and isn’t built just to rank your blog post. For your example about gold you would want to include a summary of what the post is about like “how much does gold weigh?” or “Why is gold so valuable?”. You will have a better chance of driving traffic from some of those longer tail keywords than you will from a keyword like “gold”.

Once you have enough content geared around a specific topic like gold, your main site should rank better for that general topic giving you a chance to actually compete with the Wikipedias of the internet.