Updated on April 15th, 2024 at 09:51 pm
Enter your title tags, meta descriptions website page intro text or any other text string to instantly see how many characters long it is.
How our Title Tag & Meta Description Length Checker Works
The title tag length checker is a simple piece of code that counts the characters of the text string you enter.
Once you enter it you can check the length using the number.
If you’re writing a title tag (meta title) aim for 50 – 60 characters.
If you’re writing a meta description aim for 150 characters.
You can check the length of URLs, on page intro text and H1 tags too.
Make sure your URLs are as short as possible, but also include keywords.
Why Title Tags are Important
Title tags (sometimes referred to as meta titles) are important if you want your website to gain traffic from search engines like Google, Bing, Yandex and DuckDuckGo because search engines use the keywords included in your title tags as ranking signals to help determine what results to show your pages on.
Matching your title tags with keywords relevant to the content on your pages and with keywords that users are searching for can help you to gain more clicks, leads and sales from search engine users.
A title tag that is too long may only partially show which may affect CTR (click through rate).
Title tags are confirmed ranking factors, meaning pages with optimised title tags are likely to rank better in search engines for highly competitive search queries than an equivalent page that lacks optimised title tags.
Optimised title tags can also get more clicks because users can see them as more appealing than other results they see.
The clicks you get on organic search results are called the CTR and is measured by dividing the clicks you receive by the total number of impressions.
What is a Title Tag?
Title tags are the string of text included in the <title></title> element within the <head> of every webpage.
Title tags are sometimes referred to as meta titles.
The title tag is used by search engines to help determine what the webpage is about and is commonly shown on search engine results pages (SERPs) to users entering search queries similar to or related to the words used in your title tag.
Title tags also commonly include the brand name of the website or service that has published the page.
What Should your Title Tag Include?
Keywords. You should include relevant keywords in your title tags so your pages appear on relevant search results related to the content that appears on your pages.
If you are a financial services brand, summarising the best balance transfer credit cards you should mention “best balance transfer credit cards” in your title tag.
If you’re a wealth manager writing a page about inheritance tax advice you wouldn’t want to use a generic title like; “Wealth Management Services” but instead focus on the content of the page like “Inheritance Tax Advice” or “Inheritance Tax Services”.
You should also try to make your title tags clickable. This means, appealing to the users reading them so they want to visit your website.
What is the Optimal Length of a Title Tag?
The optimal length to write your title tags to is 60 characters including all spaces and non-standard characters like separators – or |.
You should write title tags to a strict 60 character limit because this will help to ensure that your title tags don’t get truncated for search engine users using mobile devices, tablets or larger laptop and desktop devices.
Use our title tag length checker to test your title tags. Paste your title tag in above to instantly see how many characters it is.
Is there a title tag character limit?
There is no official character limit for title tags or meta title tags. The HTML element itself can support any number of characters.
However, search engines only display up to 512 pixels or around 55 – 60 characters.
Browsers also limit the total number of characters they will display and this varies by browser type.
For example, now retired Internet Explorer limited title tag characters to display only the first 2,048 characters.
Whereas Google Chrome and Firefox are capable of displaying up to 4,096 characters of title tags for webpages.
How to Write a Title Tag
Writing title tags is easy and quick to do, however, creating quality title tags that will help to benefit the organic search performance of your website may take much longer, especially when you factor in required keyword research.
You may find you spend as long as 20 minutes on each title tag to get it completely perfect. An organic search specialist could help you create perfect titles faster.
An organic search consultant could help you do this faster. Contact us today to discuss your needs.
Writing title tags is best done after you’ve undertaken keyword research to help identify specific keywords that are related to your pages, are frequently searched for and will help your business generate leads and sales.
Writing title tags is best completed in Google sheets or excel and should pay attention to keywords that drive traffic to your pages already as well as potential new keywords that are relevant to your page content.
Here are more tips on creating the perfect title tags in our web story content.
Top Tips for Writing Title Tags
- Write your title tags to a maximum of 60 characters
- Include keywords
- Put keywords first in your titles
- Finish your title tags with your brand name use a separator – or | before your brand name
- Check for spellings and mistakes before you publish – Grammarly is a fantastic free spell checker.
- Capitalise each word
- Iterate your title tags overtime and search queries and trends change
- Remove unnecessary words and avoid words that add nothing
- Make titles irresistible to users so they want to click them
Want help with your title tags? Check out our SEO services and find out more about our technical SEO, content strategies for SEO and link building services.
Once you’ve rewritten your title tags make sure you ping your sitemap.xml to Google so they can crawl your fresh titles.
What is a Meta Description?
Meta descriptions are only shown to users on SERPs. They commonly include a high number of keywords that relate to the content found on the page and help to sell the benefit of your content to users scrolling through SERPs.
Meta descriptions are included in the HTML <head> of webpages within a meta name=”description” field.
Google might create and show programmatic meta descriptions pulled from on page content or created by combining certain text strings from your pages.
How Many Characters Should a Meta Description Include?
Your meta description can be as long as you like. However, search engines commonly only show around 120 – 160 characters.
You will want to consider what your meta descriptions will say carefully because whether or not a user clicks on the results shown can depend on what they read about your business, your products and your services from the meta description field and the title tag that search engines show.
How to Write a Meta Description
Descriptions are important because it is the first taste of the content of a page that your potential users will see. It might help to consider the following tips when writing meta descriptions for your website.
Top tips for writing meta descriptions
- Think about and implement ways to encourage users to click through to your results as you write each meta description.
- Consider keywords and sprinkle them naturally into your descriptions.
- Sell the benefit of your product, service or business. Help users quickly understand why they will benefit from choosing you over a competitor.
- Keep meta descriptions accurate and reflect the content of the page that you are writing for
- Include keywords; keyword research is important to help create accurate, relevant meta descriptions
- don’t worry about the length (too much), because search engines can create descriptions for your pages dynamically you don’t need to worry too much about their length (writing to a character limit will help you to spend an appropriate amount of time on each title).
- Remove unnecessary words; once you’ve finalised your title tags check for unnecessary words that you can remove to help make them shorter or flow better.
- Check for spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. Ensure that all of your meta descriptions are published free from spelling or grammatical errors.
Once you’ve changed your meta descriptions don’t forget to ping your sitemap.xml to Google so they can crawl your changes.
Published on: 08/08/2022
