Google Meta Page title length, plus the others?

[WebDesignBob]

The meta page title length changes from time to time in various engines. Does anyone happen to have up to date figures, on todays Meta Page Title count, that which shows in Google, Yahoo and Bing?

 

[JElder]

Safe limits are:

Title: 70 chars (68 on some browsers)
Description: 165 characters on most search engines

However, you CAN use longer ones, and the contents are indexed, but generally will not display. There is quite strong evidence that words nearer that start (especially of page title) are given more weight than words at the end.

 

[WebDesignBob]

Safe limits are:

Title: 70 chars (68 on some browsers)
Description: 165 characters on most search engines

However, you CAN use longer ones, and the contents are indexed, but generally will not display. There is quite strong evidence that words nearer that start (especially of page title) are given more weight than words at the end.

I completely agree, that words nearer the beginning are assigned more weight. Surprisingly, you'll notice that capitalisation of words does play a very small role, too! (run some tests, see the odd position lower down the page shift, when a capital letter is removed or added).

The biggest trouble with meta page titles, when teaching others a 'rule of thumb' is that the size of the letters varies, taking up more or less space, towards the figure of "70" that you suggest. We have a character counter which changes colour (or will do) in a CMS we are building, when XX characters is reached, and Im trying to find a happy medium/figure for that figure.

Words truncate with a "..." HTML rich text makes certain words/characters bigger than others. Im thinking 60 characters is a safer bet, if 2-3 short, concise and to the point phrases are to be included and read in full without fear of truncation.

 

[payperclick]

Meta Title for your page must be under 65 to 70 around. Google can crawl upto 70 characters, you can writ more but google will not gonna give preference to your title.

 

[payperclick]

Title should be around 65 to 70 characters.
Description should be around 200 characters
This is the best way to achieve good rankings.

 

[raveemedia]

Title:
Google | Yahoo - 60 to 63
Bing - 67 to 69
Ask - 63 to 67

Description
Google - 155 to 161
Yahoo - 165 to 171
Bing - 160 to 178
Ask - 157 -172

The description can go longer with close relevance to long tail KWs in the SERP.

 

[Fearless_Shultz]

Just wanted to correct something here that I see a lot in SEO related forums.

HTML Page titles which DO affect rankings are completely different to META titles which by conventional understanding don't.

A HTML title looks like this

<title>
This is my page title which is really useful both for rankings and improving SERP CTR
</title>

A META title looks like this

<META NAME="Title" CONTENT="I'm a META title and I probably make no difference for rankings as a rule">

In terms of length, up to 70 chars for a clean title is a safe general bet as already mentioned.

The last post about Google only crawling 70 chars is incorrect. It's important to understand the difference between what is crawled / indexed and what is displayed

 

[jhardy2008]

i think standard length is:
Title: 60-65 Words
Desc: 150-160 Words
Keywords: 200-220 Words