Title tags are the oldest lever in SEO and still one of the few that changes click-through rates directly. The rules are short, and most sites break at least one of them.
How long should a title be?
Between 30 and 60 characters. Google renders titles by pixel width, not characters, so 60 is a guide rather than a wall, but past it the end gets cut on mobile. Below 30 you are usually leaving the topic unsaid. Put the specific words first and the brand last; a reader scanning results reads the beginning of the line and little else.
Should the brand be in every title?
Yes, at the end, separated by a consistent character. Rankavia uses templates for this so you never type the site name by hand: %title% %sep% %sitename% is the default for posts, and the separator is one setting for the whole site. When a page has an empty title the template collapses cleanly to the site name instead of leaving a dangling dash.
Does the meta description affect rankings?
Not directly, and Google rewrites it about half the time. It still matters because the other half is the text that persuades someone to click, and because answer engines read it as a summary of the page. Write it as a one-sentence answer of 70 to 160 characters. If you cannot summarise the page in a sentence, that is a sign about the page, not the description.
What about duplicate titles?
Duplicates happen on archives, paginated lists and tag pages more than on articles. Templates solve most of it: a page number variable on paginated titles, the term name on archives, the author name on author pages. The remaining duplicates show up in the site audit as a single list you can work through.
Updated on 8 October 2026.
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