2012-04-23 23:43, Amandil wrote:
> The Guidelines at w3.org (http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/TITLE.html)
> suggest that the title tag be no longer than 64 characters.
Technically, it says that the title element content should be less than
64 characters, i.e. at most 63 characters. But it's a rough rule of
thumb anyway. There is no formal limit, and the practical limitations
vary greatly.
In these modern times, browsers tend to display the title in a tab
rather than browser top bar. And the tabs are typically just about 30
characters wide, and their width varies by the browser window width and
the number of open tabs.
> At my
> job, I was recently tasked to play around with the page title, making
> sure (for SEO purposes) that it is no longer than 65 characters.
There's a lot of nonsense that people do, and require others to do, in
the name of SEO, without bothering about provable facts or even
plausible hypotheses.
Certainly title elements are important from the search engine
perspective, quite possible more important than any other element.
Surely it makes no sense to write a novel there, even from that
perspective. But much more often, problems are causes by too short title
texts, e.g. using the very same title element across a site
(unbelievable, isn't it? but quite common!).
It is hardly realistic to expect search engines to have any hard limits
on title texts. Rather, we can expect them to treat title elements well
if they are reasonably long, possibly ignoring the tail if the text is
very long (say, over 80 or 100 characters), possibly even getting
nastier if they suspect "title spamming" and see very, very long texts
with repeated words.
So the simple rule is: as long as necessary, but not longer. And
"necessary" means "necessary for concisely describing what the page is
about, without any context" (or, as they often say, "in the global
context"). That is, if somebody, or something, finds the text on a sheet
of paper with no other content and with no indication of where the text
comes from, he or it should get a reasonable idea of what it is.
Thus, it should not be "Main page", "Contact info", "Offers", or "Our
coolest products that are highly affordable, competitive, and
proactive!" If it contains abbreviations, they should be roughly as
known as, or better known than, "USA" or "CNN".
> Whatever the length, I'm trying to figure out if this limit is 64
> physical characters or 64 visible characters.
The old guideline that you cited refers to the display of the title
element in various context, so it relates to displayed characters
(counting spaces).
> In other words, if I
> stick the & HTML entity into the title, is that counted as 1
> character or 5 characters.
Definitely one character, because browsers and search engines interpret
entity references before doing anything else with the textual content.
--
Yucca,
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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