After the discovery of SEOMofo that Google not counts characters but pixels of a page title, I had to made a “tool” for it. And by “I”, I mean my good friend Yoeran. Measure the amount of pixels of any given page title.
After some experimenting, I found out that the maximum width of a page title is between 466 and 496 pixels.
Since Google determines all by itself what to show as page title on a SERP, you better make sure that your expanded page title is relevant to the content.
E.g. filling a page title with 121 “|” characters won’t work – Google will replace your page title on the SERP.
Experiment to expand your content
Ok, it’s not the most nifty SEO tool you’ll ever see. But I’m sure you’ll be as excited as I was when you break the rule of maximum 70 characters.
Page Title Pixel Meter – measure your page titles!
Use Page Title Pixel Meter in your own projects
Do you want to use the Page Title Pixel Meter in your own projects? Grab the code and drop me a line or a link. Make sure you view the source of the iFrame. You can use and distribute it freely. Just leave the comments in the source and you are good to go. If you implement the script and dropped me an e-mail, I will add your project on this page (including link).
When could you use the Page Title Pixel Meter?
There are some scenarios the script will be of added value, e.g.:
- You have a SEO WordPress plugin
- You are developing your own CMS
- Any other system or tool using page titles
Give your users direct visual feedback of how many pixels wide their page title will be. Break the 70 character rule and give your users the freedom of pixels.
Cool tool, didn’t know that about page titles, thanks for sharing..
Thanks Mathieu! This is a definite bookmark!
Is this true of the meta descriptions, too? I’ve noticed that some meta descriptions returned by Google display more than 160 characters, and some are cut off at less than 160 characters.
Awesome tool, thank you for putting this together. Been doing some research on best practices for title tags and since there is no real character limit this tool works great.
Hi Mathieu,
I’ve been using your tool and think it’s great, so thank you for making it available.
I wondered if you think that today’s changes to how Google SERPs are displayed will make any difference to the effectiveness of the tool?
Dids
Hi Mathieu, great tool thanks for providing. Can you offer insights as to why there are different readings in Firefox vs. Chrome? Also I’m finding your tools is more accurate to calculating literal pixel width (tested in Photoshop) and Screaming Frog is estimating title width about 16% higher which is alarming because until now our agency has been relying on SF…switching to this tool now.
Hi, any chance you could update this? Google is showing less pixel width now. Really neat tool.
Update: Google recently increased the font size of their titles but not the pixel length. Because of this, 435 pixels is a more proper target to aim for if you are using this tool.
I just found out that I had a whole word truncated off of the end of a title I wrote a couple of months ago that was only 458 pixels long on the pixel meter.
So do you recommend using pixels or getting under the 117 character count? I have a title over 117 characters but it shows 462 pixels.
Big thanks for you Mathieu. This is awesome tool. :D
Excellent for measure Page Title Pixel Meter!!!
Thanks for sharing!!!