When writing Titles and Descriptions keep in mind the amount of characters before they’ll get truncated by Google or Yahoo. This is important because you want your keyword, and/or call-to-action to appear bolded in the search results.
The character cutoffs are different for Google and Yahoo. For Google, the Title Tag is 68 characters before Google truncates. Yahoo truncates the Title tag at 114 characters.
Remember to optimize your title tags.
The Description tag gets truncated at 155 characters in Google. In Yahoo, I’ve seen the description tag as long as 384 characters.
If you don’t feel like counting characters, then a Meta Description Tag of 25-30 words should do fine. Another strategy is to just take the first 2-3 lines of the page’s text to use as the description tag.
What do you do if you have to rewrite thousands of Title tags for a huge website with thousands of URL’s? You might want to think about writing dynamic Titles and Descriptions.
It’s possible to dynamically change the Title, and Description depending on the page by defining your variables and using a database. Others ideas I’ve heard are to create the title dynamically by looking at the variables in the URL, or the breadcrumb navigation, or a designated list of keywords.
No related posts.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
It’s very important not to SEO Overkill your title tag. Many will have the tendancy to try to fit as many keywords as possible into this tag (since it is most likely the #1 on page factor to influence the algos).
Some great resources on writing title tags:
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002934.html
http://www.highrankings.com/allabouttitles.htm
http://www.seomoz.org/blogdetail.php?ID=1010
Tools like IBP are good at giving you a sense of balance for your title tags and other content… to much is just as bad (or worse) than too little.
As for the dynamic aspect – it if it server side code, won’t the search robots pick up your %variables and not the content?
Good news, Stephen. You won’t be able to see the variables on the page if it’s server side. Server side code runs on the web server and pushes out the results to the client’s browser. Since spiders are little more than non-visual browsers, they’ll see the same results as any of us.
Try this out. Go to a site you know has dynamic page titles, and go to View > Source in IE or View > View Source in FF. In the <title> tag you’ll see the same text that appears in your browser’s title bar.
By the way… this is one such site that uses Dynamic Page titles. Just view source on this page and see what appears.
I suspected this was true – thanks for confirming Chris. Therefore, Shimon’s article is a good one. One of the tenants of good seo title tags is that they are different for each page. and that the title should reflect that pages keyword phrase.
excellent.. thanks
I think Google bot reads only page source code,
if some one use dynamic variable to for title or meta tag then is there any effect for the same?
{ 1 trackback }