Title Tags and Meta Descriptions: The Right Length and Common Mistakes

In Google’s results, your page boils down to two things: a clickable blue title and a couple of lines of text underneath. Those two elements are the title tag and the meta description. They’re usually written once, often in a hurry, and then forgotten — yet they largely decide whether a searcher clicks on you or on the result next to yours.

Here’s what each one does, the length to aim for, and the mistakes found on most websites.

Title and meta description: what’s the role of each?

• The title tag is the page’s title as Google understands it. It’s a relevance signal: the main keyword and the topic of the page should be clear from it. It also shows in the browser tab.
• The meta description is a short summary of the page. It isn’t a direct ranking factor, but it works as the sales pitch in the results: it’s what makes people want to click. Google often uses it, but not always — it may show a snippet of the page content instead if it considers that more relevant to the query.

Both live in the page’s code, inside the <head> section.

What length should you aim for?

There’s no official character limit: Google truncates based on the pixel width available in the results. The usual rules of thumb, valid for most pages:

Element	Recommended length	Note
Title tag	about 50 to 60 characters	beyond that, the end is replaced by ”…”
Meta description	about 140 to 160 characters	shorter on mobile, so be concise

These are orders of magnitude, not hard thresholds: a title with lots of wide letters or capitals takes up more room than one in narrow lowercase. Always put the most important information at the start, so it survives any truncation.

How to write them well

• A unique title per page, with the main keyword as early as possible, phrased naturally.
• A clear promise: what will the searcher find? A benefit, a number or a format (guide, list, comparison) makes a result more appealing.
• Brand name at the end, not the beginning, except on the homepage.
• A meta description that complements the title instead of repeating it, ideally ending with a nudge to act.
• A tone that matches the content: if the page doesn’t deliver on the promise, the visitor goes straight back and that’s a bad signal.

The most common mistakes

1. Missing title or meta description. Google then makes up a title from the content, rarely a flattering one.
2. Duplicate text across pages: common on online shops and template-generated sites. Google can’t tell which page to show for which query.
3. Title too long: the keyword or closing argument vanishes into the ellipsis.
4. Title too short or too vague (“Home”, “Products”): no information, no keyword.
5. Keyword stuffing: a comma-separated list of terms is unreadable for people and useless for the search engine.
6. Meta description left as the CMS default, or copy-pasted from the start of the article.
7. Title and H1 on completely different topics: they needn’t be identical, but they should be about the same thing.

How to check your site

On a single page, right-click, “View page source” and look for <title> and name="description". On a site with dozens of pages that gets tedious fast: a crawler that goes through every page and flags missing, too-long or duplicated tags saves a lot of time. Fix first the pages that already get plenty of impressions but few clicks — see our article on Google CTR — since they pay off fastest.

Want to go further?

In Digi-Pilot, the audit crawler checks the title tag and meta description of every page: missing, too short or too long, with a list of the pages to fix first. Start with a free SEO check of your website, then create an account to track your pages over time.