How to write title tags that fit
Almost every guide tells you to keep a title under about sixty characters. That advice is wrong in a way that only shows up on some sites — because search engines truncate by pixel width, and characters are not all the same width.
The character count is the wrong unit
A title of narrow letters fits far more than a title of wide ones. That is a minor inaccuracy in English and a serious one elsewhere: East Asian characters render at roughly double the width of a Latin one, so a Japanese title of twenty characters occupies about forty Latin characters' worth of space.
Docket measures width rather than length, and the reason is a bug it had. A real product title on a Japanese site — nineteen characters — was reported as "shorter than the minimum" on eighteen of twenty pages. In width units it was thirty-one: comfortably normal. The tool was applying an English rule to a language it does not fit, and reporting the mismatch as the site's fault.
If your site is entirely English the practical difference is small — a title of capital Ws truncates sooner than one of lowercase Ls, and that is about it. If any part of your site is in Japanese, Chinese or Korean, a character-counting tool will report problems that do not exist and miss ones that do.
What to aim for
Long enough to say what the page is, short enough to survive the results page. A title that gets cut mid-word loses the words you chose most carefully, which are usually at the end.
Two things that matter more than hitting a number:
- Put the distinguishing words first. Truncation happens at the end, so a title that opens with your brand name and closes with the page's actual subject loses the subject. "Emergency plumber, Leeds — Smith & Co" survives truncation. "Smith & Co — emergency plumbing services in Leeds and surrounding areas" does not.
- Every page needs its own. Duplicate titles across a site are a signal that the pages are interchangeable, and search engines will pick one and drop the rest. Template-generated titles that differ only by a hidden ID are duplicates as far as a reader is concerned — how to fix duplicate title tags covers what that costs and what it does not.
Keyword stuffing is a real check, not a legacy one
Repeating the same term through a title still happens, mostly from templates that concatenate a category, a subcategory and a product name that all contain the same word. "Plumber — Plumbers in Leeds — Leeds Plumber" is not a keyword strategy, it is three copies of one word crowding out anything that would make someone click.
Meta descriptions
They are not a ranking factor and they do decide clicks. Google frequently rewrites them, which is not a reason to leave them empty — a rewrite drawn from a page with no description is usually a sentence you would not have chosen.
The same width rule applies, and the same duplication rule: a description repeated across a category's worth of pages tells a reader nothing about which result to click.
What Docket reports, and why they are separate checks
Missing, too short, too long, stuffed, and duplicated are five different findings because they are five different jobs. A page with no title needs writing; a page with a title that is forty characters too long needs cutting; a hundred pages sharing one title needs a template change. Rolling them into one "title issues" count tells you the size of the problem and nothing about the work.
Widths are measured in half-width units — a Latin character counts one, a full-width East Asian character counts two — so the same thresholds apply to every language on your site.
Common questions
How long should a title tag be?
Long enough to identify the page and short enough to survive truncation. The useful unit is rendered width rather than character count, because search engines truncate by pixel width and characters are not all the same width.
Why does character count give the wrong answer?
East Asian characters render at roughly double the width of a Latin one, so a twenty-character Japanese title occupies about forty Latin characters' worth of space. Counting characters applies an English rule to languages it does not fit.
Where should the important words go in a title?
First. Truncation happens at the end, so a title opening with your brand name and closing with the page's subject loses the subject.
Do meta descriptions affect ranking?
No, but they affect clicks. Google often rewrites them, which is not a reason to omit them — a rewrite drawn from a page with no description is usually a sentence you would not have chosen.
Are duplicate titles a problem?
Yes. They signal that pages are interchangeable, and search engines will generally pick one and drop the others. Template titles differing only by a hidden ID count as duplicates.