Title and Meta Description Letter Counter for SEO

This online tool is great for people who publish web pages and need to check the letter count of their web page's title and meta description. This letter counter will help you make sure that the title and page description are the right length according to the most recent SEO guidelines.

I made it because I often need a tool like this to quickly check the metatags for pages I want to publish.

How Long Should a Page Title and Meta Description Be?

These things are largely determined by how Google uses them as they are by far the number one factor in bringing organic search traffic to your site. The short answer is a page title should be less than 60 letters and a meta description should be less than 160 characters. Think of it as the 60/160 rule of thumb and you'll never forget it. I have more detailed information below this metatag tool if you want to know more about the SEO specifics.

I also have a word counter tool for checking the word count of your content that you might like... if you're into that kind of thing.

Character Counter

Paste in your title and/or description information and click the Count the Characters button. Your results will appear just above the button.

PAGE TITLE (60 characters or less)

PAGE DESCRIPTION (160 characters or less)

The results will appear here.

What Is the Correct Length for a Title Tag?

The title tag for a web page should be no longer than 55 to 60 characters. This is the amount of characters that Google will display in their search results before cutting off titles that are longer than that. If you use less than 50 characters then your full title will show up in the search results pretty much 100% of the time. If you use roughly 55-60 characters then about 90% of your titles will show up without being truncated.

Why Do Some Titles Get Cut off at 60 Characters?

It's because the space for a title is determined by pixel length not the number of letters.

Google reserves about 600 pixels space for your title. So it depends of exactly what letters are used in your title and how they affect the length. For example, visually, these five letters "iiiii" will take up less space than these five letters, "OOOOO". This is why your 60 character titles will sometimes get cut off.

Google Doesn't Care about Your Title Length

It's not necessarily that Google punishes you directly for a cut-off title but a truncated title will make the page's intent unclear to some visitors who see it in the search listing and consequently they will click these links a little less. Because of responses like this, your page will show up lower down in the Google search results in the future.

What is the Correct Length for a Description Metatag?

Aim for the character count of a description to be anywhere from 80 to 160 characters.

Mobile does seem to display more characters currently so some people are recommending longer titles but I would still aim for under 160 letters. I believe that making descriptions that are shorter, and punchier will get you more clicks from people in the long run.

Primarily, you should look less at the description as a piece of SEO information that you're trying to jam keywords into and look at it more like a compelling advertisement for your page.

Crafting the description copy to make it more interesting to potentials viewers should be your first goal. Do this and you'll get visitors. But the description metatag should, generally, have at least part of the words or key phrase from your title in it somewhere in order to help Google to really understand what the page is about.

Language Versions

Title and Meta Description Letter Counter is also available in German (Titel- und Beschreibungs-Buchstabenzähler), French (Compteur de lettres de titres et de descriptions) and Spanish (Contador de Letras de Título y Descripción).