How long a title tag and meta description should be

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• #marketing
• #writing
• #web
• #in-browser

The title tag and meta description are the two pieces of text most people see before they ever visit your page. They make up most of a search result, and they decide whether someone clicks. Write them too long and Google cuts them off with an ellipsis, often right before the important word.

Google measures pixels, not characters

The common advice is "60 characters for a title, 160 for a description". That is a useful rule of thumb, but it is not how the cut-off works. Google truncates by display width. A title column on desktop is roughly 600 pixels wide, and letters are not all the same width:

Capital letters, M and W take far more room than i, l and t. A title written in capitals might be cut at 45 characters; one full of narrow letters might fit 70. Character counts are an estimate. The only reliable test is to see the text rendered at the real width.

Lengths that usually fit

As a working guide:

Mobile results show less description text, so anything vital belongs in the first 110 characters or so.

Put the important words first

Truncation always takes the end. So the order of a title matters more than its exact length.

• Lead with what the page is about. "Concrete slab calculator: volume and bags" survives truncation. "Plan your next backyard project with our free easy-to-use concrete slab calculator" loses the useful part.
• Brand at the end, if at all. "Page topic | Site name" means the brand is what gets cut, which is usually fine. Many sites drop the brand on long titles entirely.
• One topic per title. A title stuffed with three keyword variants reads as spam and rarely ranks better for any of them.

Writing the description

The meta description does not directly affect ranking, but it affects whether people click, and that matters. A good description:

• Says what the page does or answers. "Work out how many bags of concrete you need for a slab, footing or post hole, with waste allowance."
• Matches the search. Google bolds words in the description that match the query, which draws the eye.
• Is specific. Numbers, formats and concrete outcomes beat "learn more about our great resources".
• Is unique per page. Duplicate descriptions across a site make every result look the same and give Google a reason to ignore them.

Avoid stuffing it with keywords, and avoid starting with the site name. Both waste the part people actually read.

When Google rewrites them

Google does not always show what you wrote. It replaces titles and descriptions when it thinks something else on the page matches the search better. This happens more when:

• The title is very long, vague or stuffed with keywords.
• The description is missing, very short or the same as on other pages.
• The search is for something mentioned deep in the page rather than in the description.

A rewrite is not a penalty. But if Google keeps rewriting a page's title, it is often a sign the title does not describe the page well. Using the main heading of the page as a starting point for the title helps, since Google often falls back to the heading anyway.

Other tags worth checking

While you are in the page head, a few related tags affect how the page appears:

• Canonical. Tells search engines which URL is the main version when the same content is reachable at several.
• Robots. A stray noindex left over from a staging site will keep a page out of search entirely.
• Open Graph and Twitter tags. Control the title, description and image when the page is shared on social media and in chat apps. These are separate from the search title, so a page can have a short search title and a longer, friendlier share title.

Try it

The SERP preview tool shows a title, URL and description as they would look in Google on desktop and mobile, with truncation applied at the real pixel widths, so you can see exactly where the cut falls. If you are stuck for wording, the meta description generator writes five candidates in the 120–160 character range and scores them against your keyword. To audit a page you have already published, the meta tag checker reports title and description lengths along with the canonical, robots and social tags. More tools are in the SEO section.