FAQ: Is There a Wrong Way to Write Title Tags for SEO?
Written by James Parsons • Updated June 22, 2024
A long, long time ago, there were many different “meta” fields you could add to the HTML of a website to gain benefits, either from search and categorization algorithms or from browsers directly. These elements were quite useful right up until they weren’t.
The meta Keywords field was the first to go. Before search engines had any concept of indexing the content of a page, they could look at the keywords field and get a rough idea of what a page was about; but very quickly this became a vector for abuse, and as soon as search could ignore them and look at the page itself, the field was largely ignored, though it took years to fully die out.
Next, and still in the process of dying out, is the meta description field. This field is meant primarily for plaintext and is the source of the few sentences beneath the title in a Google search result. It’s the elevator pitch for the page, so to speak. A while back, though, I did a rough survey and found that 70-90% of search results don’t use the same meta description specified on the page. It’s still used sometimes, but Google, in particular, largely seems to customize the field to include something relevant from the page for the search result, making it more personalized for the searcher.
The third and indisputably most important of the three – and the one that currently shows no sign of dying out – is the title tag.
Fun fact: the <title> tag in a website is the only actually required tag for a website to be considered valid, according to browsers and W3 validation. Technically, the smallest possible website would be:
<! DOCTYPE html><title>Your Title Here</title>
You don’t even need the <html> or <head> or any other elements! The title is just that important.
Title tags are incredibly important. They’re the first and biggest part of a page that a user sees in search results. They’re what shows up when your post is embedded in social media or messengers like Teams or Discord. Critically, they aren’t necessarily what shows up in the H1 tag at the top of your page; in fact, marketers often test variations in titles by making these different and rotating them around.
Title tags are critical, but that means a lot of attention has to be paid to them. Is there a wrong way to write them? Are there mistakes you can make that can cause you problems, either immediately or down the road? The short answer is yes, so let’s talk about the long answer.
What’s the Difference Between Meta Titles and Title Tags?
First, let’s talk about one issue that crops up and one possible mistake you can make.
See, we marketers refer to two titles for a given webpage: the main title in H1 and the meta title in the <title> tag. But, in reality, there are at least two more than that.
First, there’s the actual meta title. This is an attribute of the <meta> tag rather than the <title> tag, which is where confusion comes up. <meta name=”title” content=”Your Post Title” /> is technically another way to make a title tag for a post. Ostensibly, this was the original way to make a meta title that a search engine or other crawler would read, but since the <title> tag is already there and more important, this meta title type was never really used. You still see it now and then, though.
This is where the first mistake comes in: using the meta title rather than the title tag. It’s a mistake common amongst novices who hear the term “meta title” and assume, reasonably but incorrectly, that it means the meta property.
The other way a post can have a meta title is in social media embed formatting. While most forms of social media will pull roughly the same data that Google does, Facebook has its own metasystem called the Open Graph. So, a website will also have something that looks like
<meta property=”og:title” content=”Your Title Here” />
This specifies the title for your post when it’s shared on Facebook and from any other system that chooses to use Facebook’s meta information over other kinds of meta information.
This is the second mistake: not using this field. While Facebook can still pull your <title> tag and other information normally, they also have different space allowances and requirements, so it’s often better to specify a slightly different title in the OG field than what you use in your <title> tag.
Is Having a Title That’s Too Long a Bad Thing?
The length of your title tag is important, but can it be too long? Well, there are multiple answers to this question.
The first is the question: is there a hard limit? Is there a maximum to the number of characters that can be placed between <title> and </title>? The answer is no. Technically, you could put an entire novel in the title tag of a webpage. 99% of it would be invisible (since there’s nowhere for it to render), but it would be there if you had viewed the page source. In fact, in rare cases, online hacker games might use a technique like adding a few hundred spaces and then a critical piece of information to that title, so you have to view the source code of a page to get the next hint to a puzzle.
The second question is: do browsers have a hard limit? In the past, like in very old versions of Internet Explorer, this could be the case; IE had a 512-character limit for a while. These days, though, there’s no technical limit, at least as far as I’m aware.
Next up, look at the top of your screen right now (if you’re on a PC or Mac web browser; you don’t get a title display on mobile) and see how much space your browser allocates to the title. I don’t mean the title of the post in the H1, I mean the title that shows up in the browser itself.
There’s probably a lot of space there. You have the title of the blog post, the icon for the browser you’re using, space for the close and minimize buttons, and so on, but also a lot of empty space there. All of this space is technically available for a longer page title. In fact, you can experience this for yourself. Go to Google and type in a search query that’s a hundred words long, and you’ll see it populate that top bar. There’s a maximum here, but only because there’s a finite width to your browser on your screen.
Here’s the thing: none of this is valuable and can, in fact, be bad for your site. There are two reasons.
The first reason is that the longer your title is, the less valuable it is. Most of these extra-long titles simply don’t render or display anywhere useful, so the only reason you would have to make one that long is keyword stuffing, where you try to put so many keywords into the title of the page that you gain unnatural value from it.
The second reason goes back to Google search. Google’s search results have a fixed amount of space for a title; anything longer than that space is truncated with a trailing […] that cuts off whatever is at the end of the title.
Interestingly, Google’s cutoff can vary. Their own guidance tells you to aim for 50-60 characters, which is pretty short! But even then, Google can cut off a title much earlier. This is how I see three different titles in search results:
- Common Mistakes with Title and Heading Tags and How to …
- Title tag: the ultimate reference guide to make it work for you
- What is an SEO Title Tag? | Constant …
With these three, the first is 56 characters before truncation. The page is here, and the full title is a bit longer because it adds the author’s name and the site’s name (Medium), but if Google allowed just eight more characters, it would have the full basic title.
The second, from this page, is 65 characters long and not truncated. It’s above the generally-recommended max, but still works.
The third is here and is cut off after just 38 characters. Even without the truncation, it’s only one word longer, making it shorter than the others even then. Why is it cut off, then? I don’t know. Maybe it has something to do with their live chat plugin flashing a “new message” title change at you? That’s an annoyance to me personally, but it would be interesting if it also counted it as added characters for a title and caused premature truncation. Something to look into!
Anyways, the crux of the issue is this: you can have a title that is too long, and the main reason is that the full thing won’t show up where you need it most, which is in Google’s search results. Google doesn’t have a hard limit, so you just have to test titles and make sure they work.
Is Having a Title That’s Too Short a Bad Thing?
What about the flip side? Can you have a title tag that’s too short?
This is a lot easier to answer: yes, and for one reason. That reason is simply that a short title likely doesn’t convey enough information to be attractive in search. You could, for example, simply have <title>A</title> on your page. Would anyone click on a search result with just that as the title? Probably not.
You can see short titles from time to time. Often, they’re things like “The Beginner’s Guide to SEO” which is short, but punchy, and contains everything a user needs to know about the contents of the page. You also often see shorter titles as the titles of YouTube videos added to search results, because YouTube’s native search has a shorter character space constraint.
There’s also the fact that Google is absolutely not above editing your title. If your <title> tag is empty or too short to be useful, they’ll probably just take your H1 title and use that instead.
Is it Possible to Over- or Under-Optimize a Title?
Of course! If your title is something like <title>The Ultimate Guide to SEO Including Headings, Keywords, Content Marketing, Marketing Strategies, and More</title>, you’re probably going to get dinged for keyword stuffing, at least to a very small degree. And, after all, no one is going to even see most of it, as it’ll be truncated basically everywhere.
Under-optimization is trickier, but it really just comes down to having a title that doesn’t have meaningful information in it. If your title is just <title>A Webpage About Nothing</title>, you’re either a Seinfeld fan site or you’re losing out.
Are There Other Title Mistakes You Can Make?
A few.
Having a title that is very mismatched from the content of the page can be a detriment. If your title tag is irrelevant, chances are Google will ignore it in favor of the H1 title. It’s more likely to be a steep penalty if you’re trying to use it to somehow game Google Ads, though; that’s where Quality Score comes into play, and the disconnect between title, copy, and page can be devastating.
Another potential issue is not making unique titles for each page. This isn’t usually an issue – if nothing else, just using your H1 title is often good enough – but sometimes you’ll find a website where the title is just something like “Brand Name – Blog” and nothing else. Again, Google will just take the H1 for the search results, but it’s still not good practice to ignore the <title> tag entirely.
Some people say you should include your brand name in your title. I’m of two minds on this. I don’t do it, and I haven’t really felt like I’ve missed anything because of it. Some people say if they do it, Google rewrites their title to put the brand in the front, potentially cutting off the last couple of words of their real title and leaving it truncated. Having the full title can also truncate a page where cutting the brand name off wouldn’t. Is this meaningful? Probably not a lot, but it’s something worth considering.
Finally, using special characters that don’t render properly in a title can be detrimental. Google might ignore them, or leave them in and make it messy, so just test and make sure your titles look good and you’ll be fine.
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