How long should a title tag be?
Search engines don't cut titles off at a character count. They cut them off when the text runs out of horizontal space. On Google desktop that is roughly 600 pixels, which works out to about 50–60 characters of normal text. The character count is only an estimate because letters have different widths: a title full of W and M is truncated much sooner than one full of i and l.
This checker estimates each character's width at the font sizes Google uses for titles and snippets, then compares the total with the limits for Google and Bing on desktop and mobile. When a title is too wide, the preview shows where the ellipsis would land.
How long should a meta description be?
Google desktop shows about 920 pixels of description, roughly 140–160 characters, and mobile shows less, around 680 pixels. There's no penalty for a longer description, but the end won't be visible, so put the part that earns the click first.
Google doesn't always use your meta description. It often writes its own snippet from the page text when that matches the query better. A clear, specific description still gets used more often than a generic one, and it's what appears when people search for the page's main topic.
Tips for titles and descriptions that fit
- Lead with the words people search for. If the end is cut off, the part that matters is still visible.
- Keep brand names short and at the end. "| Brand" costs 60–80 pixels on every page.
- Avoid all caps. Capital letters are the widest characters and use up the space fastest.
- Write one per page. Duplicate titles and descriptions across many pages make it harder for search engines to tell them apart.
- Don't pad descriptions. A 120-character description that answers the query beats a 160-character one that repeats the title.
Checking titles and descriptions across a whole site
One title is easy to check by hand. A few thousand aren't. bseoa flags pages with no meta description on every crawl. Add --serp-mode to a CLI crawl and it measures the pixel width of every title and description and flags ones that are missing, too short, or wide enough for Google or Bing to truncate.