#41 How to do Quality Content
October 19, 2021#43 Is Your Home Being Hacked?
November 2, 2021
I just got confirmation on something from Google that I think just might interest you.
Or it might not, we’ll find out.
Back in May of 2021, on Episode 18, I talked about title tags and how important they are not only for people, but to search engines.
I highly recommend that you listen to that episode, it’s only six minutes long. It’s called Don’t be Entitled.
I talked about how long to make your title tag and your description during that episode, because the general consensus right now is that your title tag should be 60 characters, including spaces.
I realize this is getting a bit techie, but it will make sense soon.
Just in case you don’t remember, when you do a search on Google, and the results come up; that top line in bold is the title tag. And if you see the three dots at the end of the title tag, that means there’s more to the title tag than what you see.
So, you only see the first 60 characters, including spaces. The description, the sentence below the title tag, is usually 120 characters.
But I just got confirmation from Google, that more than 60 characters in the title tag has an advantage to it.
Now, of course, I wasn’t talking to somebody from Google, you can’t really do that. It’s difficult to get them on the phone at the best of times. But Google has a new podcast called Search Off the Record.
And I got this from their Season One, Episode 15, March of 2021 podcast.
Click here if you want to listen to it yourself, I don’t recommend it.:) Most of the episode is a live q&a from web designers like myself asking questions. And a lot of the episode talks about server-side JavaScript parsing, and how it can make or break the speed of a website.
Go ahead and listen to the episode if you’re interested in that; I was interested. But since it was a live q&a, they had a lot of questions. One of the questions was: Is there an advantage to having a long title tag for each web page? One of the guys was talking to the other. And he said, “Why don’t you just give me a yes or no on this real quick so we can move on to the next thing.” And the other guy immediately said “YES.”
Which means Google will index long title tags even if people can’t read them. I tell people do a title tag up to 120 characters, including spaces. That is double what you see on the search results.
Now, it may even be possible to do more than that, and have it indexed by Google.
This is huge. I’ve had a lot of people push back since Episode 18, telling me that more than 60 characters doesn’t work. Well. Google says it will. And if Google says it well, I’m going to trust what they say more than what anybody else says.
That’s a nugget I wanted to give you today. And that’s one of the reasons why I do this podcast. I sift through hundreds of hours of podcasts, blog posts and videos to find those little nuggets that are going to help you, the average entrepreneur. No, I won’t say average, there are no average entrepreneurs; We’re all amazing entrepreneurs, aren’t we?
But I want to help you get better SEO without doing all that techie nerdy stuff. And this is one of those things. My Episode 18 shows you a little bit about how to get to that title tag and the description tag in WordPress at least. And there are ways in other apps as well.
You might use Wix, Square Pages or something else. You could probably go into YouTube and and type in “how do I do a title tag in XYZ,” and you’ll be able to find that out.
But listen to Episode 18 to get a lot more information about the title tags themselves.
-Dr. Ty Belknap, CEO, Port Bell SEO
