Menu
And how do the constraints differ in practice on various browsers?
395
The meta description is a snippet of up to about 155 characters – a tag in HTML – which summarizes a page's content. Search engines show it in search results mostly when the searched-for phrase is within the description. So optimizing it is crucial for on-page SEO.
A meta description tag gives you a chance to provide an overview of the page's content. They're limited to around 160 characters and aren't directly tied to Google's search algorithms at all. Once again, the reason you need description tags is to improve the user experience. Description tags encourage click-throughs.
The <meta> tag defines metadata about an HTML document. Metadata is data (information) about data. <meta> tags always go inside the <head> element, and are typically used to specify character set, page description, keywords, author of the document, and viewport settings.
New Google's meta description length is up to 920 pixels, which might allow for up to 158 characters. On mobile devices, the max limit is about 680 pixels and 120 characters.
The limit is More like 265 characters, as Aviva Blumstein found out in an experiment she carried out and published under the title Tested: The Best Length for a Description Tag is Longer Than You Think in 9/2011. While it is true that the snippets shown are cut down to a little less than 160 characters (looks like "at the closest word boundary before 160 chars are reached"), the entire description is used for display, but only the first ~265 characters are really searched for the keyword specified.
Doing a little math, I come out at a maximum useful length of 265 + 160 - lastword_length (as the last word ending before reaching the 165th character is the last one searched for the keyword), which makes roughly 400 characters (425 minus that "last word", including some "tolerance" as you probably don't want to count precisely where the boundary will run).
So while the keywords you want to be found should be within the first 265 characters, you can extend your meta-desc beyond that limit.
177
I think the general view is that if you think the length of your META tag might be too long, then it IS too long!
For keywords and description tags I realized some folks want to stuff every possible term they can think of in there but its a lost cause. The content of your site will get you ranked in Google and similar much better than spamming the META tags.
How Google uses Meta tags which describes using a short description... and Google doesn't even look at the "keywords" tag. (which is typically the one SEO trigger happy marketing folks stuff full of crud)
41
If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
Donate Us With
