What are the most amount of words you should use in your title meta tag?

Question

When creating the title meta tag for your web page, what are the most amount of words you should use? Does it matter? Do the first five words count the most? What are the best rules to follow when creating the title meta tag? Are there any best rules to follow?

Answer 1

Yes it does matter from two perspective:

1. Tilte text appears on the window title bar. There's limited horizontal space so you would want the text to be as meaningful as possible upfront without overloading the title bar.

2. Searchbots from search engines read the tilte text very carefully. How your page ranks in search engines is partially affected (amonst many other things) by the way you craft the title according to the search keywords you want to attract users via search engines.

Here are some best practices on the title meta tag:

- Place your title tages below the tag.
- Place 40 to 60 characters (about 12 words) between the tags including spaces. Too many words is not a good idea because it dilutes the keyword density of the important keywords in the title that should help drive search traffic to your page.
- Put the keywords/key phrase you want to focus on for this page at the very begining of the title.

If you want, you can repeat the primary keywords once (but no more then that). Limit the number of two-letter words and very common words (the, a, and) because search engines ignore them.