New Title Tag Guidelines

Google has brought a new tool for Title tags after SERP redesign was updated. SERP redesign has higher impact on SEO’s as well as it will have its effect on Title tags, data driven length limit along with its new tool.

Impact of Redesign on Titles:

Redesign of SERP has its impact on title tags and this results in increase of font size in title tag which results in limiting number of characters. Now in search results no more old rules apply for title tag. Let us consider following image:

                          

In the above images first one is search result before updation of redesign while the second one is after the update. Here it is clearly displayed that the font size increased also the number characters are cut down that is around six characters are lost after the update.

It can also be stated that we can’t conclude whether we can limit the characters by considering a particular character limit. Let us now consider another image:

                              

 In the above both title tags have 40 characters but they differ in widths, even though the font size and font used is Arial. So it can be said that it differs in spacing of font. Let us now look into it:

1.       Narrow Letters are Narrow

In the above example, if we consider alphabets lower case ‘l’ and ‘i’ take very little space while upper case ‘L’ will occupy more space. So in this font we can observe that three lower case ‘l’ will occupy little space consider to lower case ‘w’.

2.       All Caps Take up Space

Even capital letters occupy more space when compared to lower case letters. Also it looks odd if the title is completely in CAPS rather it should be used only when required such as website name or company name.

3.       Width Varies with the Query

As we know that Google will be highlighting keywords in title in bold, so even the bolded letters occupy more space. Incase if there are high number of keywords in title though it has limited characters due to Bold it occupies more space.

4.       Cut-off Titles have Less Characters

Now Google will cut-off the titles that are in CSS and appends “……” by the browser in-case of title being truncated by search engine. If we consider both cases of title where in one case it is slightly long and the other title is within limit, then the one with higher limit will be shorter than the other because when title is displayed space is required which is occupied by “……” .

A research was conducted by considering 10,000 queries where in due to different reasons only 28,410 were considered for testing. Following is the example of these Queries.

                          

So it can be noted that before update the character limit was around 42 to 68 while after it is 57-58 characters limit. So by noting all the above examples it can be concluded that it would be better for a title to limit around 55 characters and in lower case letters.