Page title length - short for menu Vs long for SEO?

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In writing a new site, (basic text and image-based information, nothing flashy) I have made all my pages short and snappy to make the menus compact and tidy. As it is the page titles that are automatically displayed in the menus. All good so far.

Next, running the most excellent new SEO tool, it lists every page on my site advising me to re-write my page titles to make them 30 characters or more, as this is really important for SEO… So I changed a few then realised my carefully designed compact menu is being systematically wrecked by all my new extra-long page titles!

So my question is, can I customise the menu so it displays a different and shorter page description than the long and wordy page descriptions that I need to have appeal to Google, et al?

Hope I’ve explained that clearly enough. Many thanks…

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@Mike4, You have a couple options which are more manual in nature so to give you total control over your navigation and naming of it…

  • You can use the inbuilt Menu and then change it into manual by unticking “Auto-add pages” so you can add your own menu names by clicking the “+”
  • The other way is using the Button element and creating your menu navigation out of it allowing you to name it however you want

Have fun! :)…

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Ah thank you greenskin.

I see that way the pages in a menu are assigned an “Item Label”, and the item label can be changed, leaving the google-friendly and long “page title” unaffected.

Very pleasing the way troublesome issues like this always turn out to have a solution in Sparkle!!

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