Short title tags - those under 30 characters - waste valuable real estate in search results. A title like “Home” or “Blog” tells search engines almost nothing about the page content. Short titles miss the opportunity to include relevant keywords and compelling copy that drives clicks from search results.

This guide shows you how to find every page with a short title tag using the crawler.sh CLI.

Step 1: Install crawler.sh CLI

Install the CLI with a single command:

curl -fsSL https://install.crawler.sh | sh

This downloads the correct binary for your operating system and architecture, places it in ~/.crawler/bin/, and adds it to your PATH. Restart your terminal or run source ~/.bashrc (or ~/.zshrc) to pick up the new PATH entry.

Verify the installation:

crawler --version

Step 2: Crawl the target website

Run a full crawl of the website you want to audit:

crawler crawl https://example.com

The crawler records every page’s title tag along with its URL, status code, and other metadata. Results are saved as an NDJSON file (.crawl) in the current directory. For larger sites:

crawler crawl https://example.com --max-pages 5000

Step 3: Run SEO audit

Run the SEO analysis on your crawl data:

crawler seo example-com.crawl

This runs all 23 SEO checks including the short titles check, which flags any page where the title tag is under 30 characters.

Step 4: Identify short titles

Look for the Short Titles section in the SEO report. Common examples of short titles include:

Generic titles like “Home”, “About”, “Contact”
Single-word titles that match the navigation label
Titles that only contain the brand name
Auto-generated titles from CMS slugs

The report lists each URL alongside its current title so you can quickly see which ones need improvement.

Step 5: Fix and re-crawl

Expand each short title to be descriptive and keyword-rich while staying under 60 characters. For example:

“Home” → “crawler.sh - Website Crawler & SEO Auditor”
“Blog” → “Blog - SEO Tips & Website Crawling Guides”
“Contact” → “Contact Us - Get Help with crawler.sh”

After fixing, re-crawl to verify:

crawler crawl https://example.com
crawler seo example-com.crawl

Why short titles matter for SEO

Search engines display roughly 50–60 characters of a title tag in results. Titles under 30 characters leave half of that space empty - space your competitors are using to include keywords and persuasive copy. Longer, more descriptive titles help search engines understand the page topic and give users a stronger reason to click. Expanding short titles to the 30–60 character sweet spot is a quick win for both rankings and click-through rate.