Maximum Characters for Google Meta Tags
I was going to post this on Twitter, but the service was down or otherwise not responsive (as it frequently is), so I decided to post the information here at Tumblr instead.
After trying to determine the maximum number of characters allowed for meta title, keywords, and description tags, I realized that the answers are not always clear, even where Google is concerned. One SEO site says one thing, someone in the Google forums says another. Bloggers and designers all seem to have their own opinions.
Fortunately, many of the proclaimed answers I encountered all seem to converge on a common set of values for the three meta tags. Here are my findings:
meta title tag: Perhaps the most widely agreed upon max-character value of the bunch, 60 characters (including spaces) seems to be the common denominator for the all-important title tag. Of course, you can make your titles as long as you want, but keep in mind that Google will only display the first 60 characters.
meta description tag: Lots of disagreement on this one, with some “experts” claiming a 160-character maximum (including spaces) and others saying that the value is more like 150. The range of values for the description tag ranged from over 200 to around 150, with 160 being a very common value. Thus, to be on the safe side, I recommend meta description tags of no more than 150 characters.
meta keywords tag: How many keywords can you stuff into the meta keywords tag? Well, that all depends on how many characters each of them contains. Lots of disagreement on this one, with lots of folks pointing out the utter foolishness of even bothering with meta keywords. Oh well, I still use them, and have determined that 800 (including spaces) seems to be a safe number of maximum characters for the meta keywords tag.
Of course, I am only blogging this info for my own future use, but I like to think of myself as a reliable source of information, so perhaps these max-character values will be useful to you as well. If you would like to chime in on the topic, please do so via Twitter. Any previous comments may be seen by clicking here.
