Width, not length
Google shows about 600 pixels of title on desktop. What fits in that depends entirely on which letters you use:
| Title | Characters | Roughly |
| --- | --- | --- |
| iiiii iiiii iiiii iiiii | 23 | fits easily |
| WWWWW WWWWW WWWWW | 17 | already too wide |
The counter above measures the real thing, in the font Google renders results in. Character counts are a proxy that fails on exactly the titles people worry about.
Front-load the distinctive words
Two reasons, and they point the same way. Truncation removes the end, so anything essential at the end is at risk. And people scan the first two or three words of a result before deciding whether to keep reading — so the words that distinguish your page from the nine others should be first.
Mortgage Calculator — Monthly Payments and Total Interest | Brand is better
than Brand | Everything You Need to Know About Our Mortgage Calculator.
One title per page
Duplicated titles across a site are a genuine problem: they make pages look interchangeable to a crawler and impossible to tell apart in a result list. If two pages want the same title, either they should be one page, or the title is not specific enough.
Questions
Why measure pixels instead of characters?+
Because Google truncates by rendered width. A title of sixty narrow characters fits where forty wide ones do not — "Illinois Immigration Litigation" is far wider than "tiny little jill" at the same length. Every "60 character limit" rule is wrong for about half of all titles, and this measures the actual width instead.
Will Google use my title?+
Often, but not always. It rewrites titles on a substantial share of queries, usually pulling from an h1 or from link text when it thinks those match the query better. Writing a good title still matters — it is what gets used when it is used, and it anchors what the rewrite is based on.
Should the brand go in the title?+
On the home page and key landing pages, yes. On a deep article, it eats width that the subject needs, and it is the first thing truncated anyway. If you include it, put it last.
Does the title tag affect ranking?+
Directly, a little. Indirectly, a lot — it is most of what someone reads before deciding to click, and click-through is what the tag is actually for. Write it for the person, not the crawler.