Optimum title length

[freebetsfreetips]

I thought title lengths of posts were meant to be relatively short (off the top of my head, 8 ish words and 40-50 characters) but have seen some ranking very well with much longer titles. Any thoughts/advice appreciated as am currently writing some stuff that is for competitive offers and so longer titles may be better as unlikely to compete for the shorter key terms.

Cheers
Bob

[chaumi]

If you're talking about ranking/what is displayed in Google SERPs, there is a cut off point at around 8 words for titles and 25 words for descriptions. Ideally you should get everything you want to say in those limits.

[justbookies]

The all in one seo plugin for wordpress suggests 60 characters maximum for titles and 160 characters for descriptions. I notice that if you have author rank working then the description is shorter than this. So maybe 145 characters should be about right in that scenario. Alternatively just take a look at the serps and just count where each is cutting off to see what you can get away with in terms of visibility. I don't think you get punished in any way for longer titles or descriptions, it just cuts off, which can look a bit crap for descriptions in particular.

[freebetsfreetips]

I meant more in terms of the ranking, not the display. So no problem with a longer title, other than will not display on google and I suppose a longer title lessens the impact of the individual words and shorter phrases? By which I mean, for example, "Free Bets" might have more "power" for "Free bets" searches than "Free bets and how to use them to make a profit in order to buy Innocent smoothies and thus save the world even though they're owned by Coca Cola and are therefore effectively worse than a banker on the board of Amazon with a dubious hard drive and a penchant for dwarves and defecation" (it's amazing what longtail hits that article got).

[Glueck]

If your post Title is set up to be your title tag you can have a maximum of 70 characters.
I suggest - you focus on a "keyword" - + a call to action phrase. Fx:

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[chaumi]

Let's take a title of around 8 words.

Your page is about pink icecreams.

If you want to rank (well), you need to have pink icecreams in that title...and I always thought that it needs to be somewhere in those 8 or so words (I could be wrong)

If your title is 15 words long, and pink icecreams is words 12 and 13, you may still rank for it, but every (good) site (and some not so good judging by some of the SERPS results you still see) will most likely rank above you (of course there are other factors which may overcome this).

Personally I wouldn't play with this. Keep title short and to the point, with main keywords early in it.

[wettFORM.AT]

I am currently working with 60-80 characters for the page title and 150 max. for the description. I think it´s not all about the lenght of the titel and description you should only avoid that your text get cut of in the SERP´s. Always try to give exact the content of your page or articles in short and clear words. You always want to try to make the user to click on it. So focus more on content of the text than only about the lengh. A few words are often better than 2-3 sentences. The page title and description is definitly a ranking factor but only one of many others. Try also to give unique page titles and descriptions for every single page if this is possible.

[LotusAffiliates]

This happens because Google considers Author name as part of description.

I notice that if you have author rank working then the description is shorter than this. So maybe 145 characters should be about right in that scenario.

[Korto Maltese]

I meant more in terms of the ranking, not the display.

you surely got a point here. the question is more relevant for news content I guess.

[FictionNet]

I sometimes use this tool to preview title/description tags.

http://www.seomofo.com/snippet-optimizer.html

[BingoWriter]

It should be under 69 characters, the reason is that web browser show only 69 character as title while searching.
A title should not be spammy, better to use it in the form of meaningful sentence.
thanks

[excel.ashutosh]

I think the visitor gets the keyword initially on the title, his search ends there..moreover only title can not get someone good rankings..there must be some other aspects which they are doing well..