Dumb SEO Questions

(Entry was posted by Dave Elliott on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 02/19/2014).

Screaming frog has a filter on `page titles` for less than 30 characters.

Screaming frog has a filter on `page titles` for  less than 30 characters. Is actually a thing in SEO? or is more just a guide as in if your page title is less than 30 characters long there is a chance you have miss-formed it in some way??
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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

  • Dave Elliott: Screaming frog has a filter on 'page titles' for  ;less than 30 characters. Is actually a thing in SEO? or is more just a guide as in if your page title is less than 30 characters long there is a chance you have miss-formed it in some way?
  • Jeremy Estes: chances are, if you're using less than 30 characters, you're not optimized for long tail. It's a nice report to see what pages are losing out on traffic.
  • Devin Peterson: I don't believe having less than 30 characters is bad at all if your title is description enough.

    "The original purpose and main intent of the title element is for the user. The title is displayed in the browser tab, which usually only shows about 25-30 characters. The search engines themselves usually display up to 65 characters. Through a consensus analysis using a reference corpus, the average title length is about 4-6 words. In that analysis, the word count was much more relevant than the character count since it largely depended on the content's theme."

    "The words within the first 30 characters are often given more weight since those are the words that will be seen by users when they actually use the page."

View original question in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 02/19/2014).

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