Here’s an interesting blog post on title tags at SEOmoz. I’ll have to agree with Ruth Burr’s conclusion here. Google seems to be doing some wonky things with title tags now. It used to be 70 characters for your title tags was a hard and fast rule that most SEOs lived and worked by. I’d say that’s probably not the case any more.
But could it be pixel width?
I hadn’t thought of that, but it makes sense. Some letters simply take up more space than others. So it’s possible. The question now is, If you run a large SEO operation where you have several content writers producing content, how do you set guidelines for you entire team so that your title tags are uniform and you still get useful, well-written titles that are well-optimized? How do you do it without succumbing to something like, “Title tags must be no longer than xxx pixels wide?”
Do you tell your team that title tags should be 70 characters or less, unless you use more than three wide letters in which case you should drop to 65 characters or less?
That seems a bit silly. Generally, I’d say writing team guidelines should be simplified. Too many variables will lead to chaos. You want your team to understand SEO principles, but you also want them to produce content that is uniform in standards and creative in output. We’re going to have to think about this one a little more.
