Meta Title and Description length – Optimum?

When I first looked in to the MSN Loophole thing it reminded me of basic ‘on page’ SEO techniques generally and while doing that I bumped into one that we should use every time we make a post but usually don’t.

I’m talking about a post or page’s META Title and Description and squeezing the right amount of letters ( and spaces) in there for maximum effect.

As usual, being lazy and in a hurry, unfocused and scatter-brained, I’d made the mistake of forgetting the basics. But,Google is ALL about the basics!

I had forgotten that, as well as being the best way to optimize your post or page as far as the text a potential visitor sees on Google’s rankings pages, a well thought out Title and Description can also be a Sales Tool. If you’re #5 with a cool, and worked out, Title and Description who cares about the guy in #4th place with a poor one that ‘runs’ off the page:

No disrespect to Fish4fun.com at all, hey they’re on page #1 after all, and Lord knows I’ve seen a lot worse where even the Title doesn’t make sense – heck, I’ll give ‘em a free back-link right here and if they bother to check it out they might learn a new twist. They are doing something right SEO wise but, as I said earlier, it’s easy to forget to use that Title/Description text to the max!

Anyway, for this post ( and thanks to my WP SEO Sniper plugin – for advanced SEO I’d suggest but the free All-In-One SEO plugin can do similar last time I checked) my ‘Title’ ( check the very top of your Browser for that and note that it’s not the same title in the large letters above) is: Best Meta Title and Description length? Meta Tags optimized! >>> which is 65 letters and spaces in total according to the free resource at http://www.lettercount.com/ ( just copy and paste your text in there ’til you get it right).

That is the Title that will appear in the Google Rankings by the way.

I’m not sure how my other settings i.e. Blog name will fit so will have to possibly tweak this – but the point is that even if the blog name comes after the 65 letter count it won’t be seen. That’s why I prefer to go for 62/63 characters and throw a couple of >> in there to fill up any gaps.

Description? If you found this post via Google it would/will read:

Meta Title, Description Length? What’s The Best? The fact is that a Meta Title should be 65 characters or less and a  Description 148 OK — MORE >>>

That’s what I’m talking about… that’s a sales pitch, a clickable phrase. Not only that but pretty glitzy SEO in there too – what do you think?

Most of the time we’re so worried about just getting our Keyword phrase into the Title and Description we forget that there is actually enough space in there to make our ranking STAND OUT from those higher on the page!

Write this on the wall next to your computer:

TiTLE = 65

DESCRiPTION = 148