[DEMO] Shortening title tags with the SEO Framework
Watch this quick demonstration to see how we shorten title tags that are too long using the SEO Framework plugin. Looking at the list of blogs here, we can see in the SEO column that three out of the four blog posts have an issue that’s indicated by a red box.
If you hover your mouse cursor over one of the red areas under the SEO column, it will show you the particular issue that you have to fix.
In the blog post Second Circuit Formally Adopts “Discover Rule” in Applying Statute of Limitations in Copyright Classes, it says that the title is far too long.
To fix this, all we need to do is to click on Edit and scroll down the blog post until you see the option to change the Meta Title.
Click on the Edit option under the blog post with Title issues that needs to be fixed:
You can check once again the errors that need to be fixed in the section above the Meta Title:
You can then go ahead and try to fix them.
The Meta Title generated is usually built from the Page Title so you would want to insert this manually instead. You can start with the same text and simply remove the last section of the Title which is usually unnecessary.
The Plugin usually upends the name of the website after the Title but this would cause your Title to be longer so you’d want to tick off the Remove the site title option to get rid of it.
Check the Remove Site Title to reduce your Meta Title’s length:
Doing so will automatically shorten the title down a bit. It’s ideal to have a title with 60 characters or Less. You can achieve this by getting rid of anything unnecessary in your title such as quotation marks.
You generally should avoid adding quotes to your website title as it’s going to prevent Google from reading or scanning your site. It will literally stop reading it when it sees quotation marks because these are used only for a specific set of purposes within code.
When you put quotation marks in your title tag, it will confuse Google and it will stop reading your website and perceive it as a code instead.
If you have anything numerical in your title like “second” or “eleven”, you might want to consider using numbers instead of spelling it out to help reduce your title length. Use “2nd” instead of “Second” or “Top 11” instead of “Top Eleven”
As much as possible, try to achieve the 60-character limit and get rid of anything that you can to shorten your title. You can get rid of filler words that wouldn’t affect the meaning of the sentence once removed.
The plugin will give you a score based on the character limit of your title tags:
Red (more than 90 chars) = far too long
Orange (more than 60 chars) = too long
Green (less than 60 chars) = good
Try to get your title to less than 60 characters to get a green score:
Note: The character limit for Meta Title doesn’t always pertain to the number of characters but the pixel width. Some characters are wider than others so it doesn’t alway depend on how many characters you have but each of their width so 60 is a good character limit to shoot for.
Once you’ve achieved that sweet spot of title length, scroll back up and click on the Update button.
Don’t forget to click on Update after making your changes:
After clicking on Update, you’ll notice that the Red mark has been changed to Blue:
If you hover once again, you’ll see that the issues have been updated as well. You can ignore the first two issues.
Branding doesn’t really matter that much on your title especially if it’s a blog post. It’s more important to convey the content of the article to capture the interest of website visitors than putting your product or company’s name upfront.
You’ll also see that it now states that the Title length is good. We can now go ahead and do this for the other articles or blog posts with the same issue.