What are meta tags anyway?
Meta tags sit in the code of your webpages. They aren’t visible to users on the page, but they can appear in the search results, and the title is often the name of the tab on your browser.
When we say meta tags, we’re usually referring to two things – the title tag and the meta description. In the code of the site, they look like this:
We advise getting relevant keywords into these tags, and putting a call to action in the description.
So how long should titles and meta descriptions be?
In our opinion, the title tag should be up to 600 pixels, and the meta description should be up to 928 pixels in length. These are based on the width of Google’s desktop search results.
You’ve probably seen sources that say the title should be 65 or 70 characters, and the description should be 155 or 160 characters. That’s easier for most people to work out, but it doesn’t work!
The reason you want to get things the right length is to make sure they fit in the search results and don’t trail off with a . . . But the search results use Arial as the font. Different characters take up different amounts of space! For example, these are both 70 characters long:
IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW
How do I work out the length in pixels?
We used to use Excel for this. In older versions of Excel, you can create columns that are 600 pixels and 928 pixels wide, set the title font to Arial 15 and the description font to Arial 10.5, and make sure what you’ve written fits in the relevant box.
However, that’s no longer reliable, as newer versions of Excel work out column widths differently.
Instead, we’ve created a tool that will check the length for you! Simply pop your tag in the relevant box and it will tell you if it’s the right length.
What about mobile sites?
At the time of writing, Google’s displaying about the same length of tag on mobile as they do on desktop, with titles running over two lines. The title and meta description tool above should work for both.
However, Google change things pretty regularly. The best thing to do is test some of the longer tags you’ve written by viewing them in the search results. You’ll have to wait a few days or potentially a week or more after you’ve written the tags and uploaded them to your site though, because Google needs time to reindex the pages and update the information it shows in the search results.
Also, note that Google doesn’t always use the meta tags in the search results. If you type your brand name, for example, it will often just show that where the title tag would usually be.
