Plenty of aspects of search engine optimisation are contentious. When it comes to page titles (that's the title which appears on the top of the browser, not the headline on the page), I always recommend that you keep things to 70 characters or fewer, so that Google will reproduce the title exactly as you wrote it, in full, in its results. We cover this, and other related subjects, early on in our Insider Programme. However, there's evidence that Google does take into account what happens after that point in longer titles, even if it doesn't show them in full, and I'm happy to concede that there's a case for longer ones.
The topic is discussed in How Long Should the Page Title Tag Be? on Search Engine Journal. It's a short, simple subject, but an important one for those of us wanting to get higher in the Google results and increasing the proportion of people who click on our entries.
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