Most SEO tools, The Crawl Tool included, will tell you when titles are too short or long. But what does this mean?

If you've been using The Crawl Tool for even a little while you may noticed comments about issues on a site in the Titles report or this "Title Best Practice" box on the project dashboard.

At The Crawl Tool we're about giving actionable information to improve your site; to action "too short" and "too long" titles means understanding what SEO tools are talking about here.

The Title tag has long been known to be a significant on-site ranking factor. And why wouldn't it? It's the very first description of the page. It's shown on the browser tab to the user, but in a world where people increasingly have about 10 million tabs open it is arguably less seen. More importantly it's shown, mostly, as it is written in search engine results and so can impact how many people click through to your page.

Let's start with too long. The general consensus for a maximum number of characters in a title is 60 characters. But why?

It's unlikely that title length is a ranking factor, maybe if a title is absurdly long it might be. What we are talking about here is title clipping. Beyond 60 characters the search engine may choose to cut off the rest of the title, and they way they do so may vary between engines and over time. If we think back to what we said about search engines using the title on your search result then we can see that in the overwhelming majority of cases this will make your title less clickable.

For this reason, you will virtually never want your title to be more than 60 characters. The are perhaps times when you want clipping for mystery, but in that circumstance you would want to control it. Another circumstance is where you're a bit early but you feel that the long title contributes to describing the topic, whilst the beginning of the title is enough to convince a user to click even when clipped. In The Crawl Tool you can click on the number next to "Too Long" or go to the Titles report and choose "Ignore", to - well - ignore it. But these should be the rare cases.

At The Crawl Tool we set a too short title as being less than 40 characters. Where a title is too short, search engines have been known to experiment with things such as using a heading tag instead. So there is a small apect of having the ability to control how your search engine listing appears here.

However, on the whole this criteria is less about visible things than a long title. Because the title of a page gives search engines clues about what a page is about, you want your title to be long enough to contain that information. A "Too Short" title is then, on the whole, an indicator that you should consider lengthening it to add more keywords and information and that you are probably wasting an opportunity to do so and to rank better.

For that reason, "Too Short" is much more of a suggestion than "Too Long". You should feel free to choose "Ignore" in The Crawl Tool if you feel that the title is already descriptive enough.

There's a third issue - "Missing" which we should talk about in process. If a title tag is missing then that's your first job - give it one!

From there, we'd suggest that you should look at titles which are "Too Long". Virtually all of these you will want to shorten whilst keeping the same meaning in them. Your thought process should also be about making them as attractive and clickable as possible - if they were shown to you target visitor search listings would they click on them?

Finally you should look at "Too Short" titles. We'd suggest that you start by ignoring ones that can't really be changed or that you are unconcerned about rank - for example, "Privacy Policy", "Cookie Policy", all come in too short but giving them a different title isn't going to help and you're normally not too concerned about ranking those pages in search engines. Then, for each remaining Title with a "Too Short" issue attached, think about if there's a longer, more descriptive, title that could replace it. If you can think of one - great. But if you feel the title is already descriptive enough and you can't improve it, then select ignore.