Test Your Title Length...

Using this handy tool, you can determine what can fit into the title of a web page. Simply type a "test" title into either of the fields and submit, then check your browser's title bar to see how it will appear online or in bookmarks.

All browsers print a minimum of 64 to 66 characters from the <title>Title Tag</title>. Many others will display longer titles (this varies from browser to browser). Additionally, bookmarks generally use the first 64 characters. Therefore, your most-relevant information should be in the first 64 characters. But how long is that, exactly? If you are a visual person, this page can help you visualize and plan your titles. This field will stop at 64 characters (Google will actually go to 66 characters in search engine listings):

But don't let any of that good SEO "real estate" go to waste! While some browsers will not display more than 64-66 characters, You can add additional information to further highlight your targeted keywords for the page. This field will stop at 120 characters, the maximum characters Yahoo! will display in search engine results:

There has been a practice by some to add special characters such as smiley faces or stars to page titles. This likely will not harm your search engine ranking, however, wasting that valuable room where a keyword could have been will not help. Additionally, what you view on your computer may not render the same on other computers. Your "special" characters could become "?" marks in your page title for many!

Adding more than 120 characters to your titles will not improve your search engine ranking because no one but you (and anyone viewing your raw source code) will ever see the extra characters!