How big can my title, description, and keyword meta tag fields be?

I’ll admit that we aren’t asked this question often, but it does come up occasionally. When we are designing a site, clients usually fall into two categories: they don’t know much about the title, description, or keyword tags and leave it up to us or they think they know enough about them to tell us what they want in them. Either way is fine with us … really! If a client leaves it up to us, we’ll take the data we need from the content they’ve provided for their site. If a client hands us the title, description, and keywords they want, we’ll incorporate them into the site as best we can.

That said, what is a meta tag? Basically, a meta tag is a special line of code that provides information about a web page. Meta tags do not, usually, affect how a site is displayed and aren’t really meant for a browser, they are meant for the search engines and can provide “hidden from view” information like your preferred description, the author’s name, and how the search engines’ robots should behave on your site. Yes, that is a very basic definition, but I did warn you it would be! Oh, and technically the title tag is not a meta tag because it is viewed within the browser but it usually gets lumped in together with the description and keyword meta tags so we’ll leave it there for this conversation!

Now, back to the question at hand. There are no rules about how long a title, description, or keyword meta tag can be. This, of course, leaves things up to the search engines and directories which is why some engines will show your full title tag and others cut you off at say 10 words, or 20 words, or whatever it is they felt like coding into the system that day. So, where does that leave us designers? Mostly, winging it as we go along…

The limits High Aspirations uses are as follows:

     Site Title: 20 words (although half that is better!)
     Description: 150 characters
     Keywords: 200 characters

Why those numbers? Well, there’s a couple of reasons. (1) They fit into our search engine submission software for the automated submissions we do. (2) They are reasonable numbers. And, (3), when we do hand submissions to the major and site category specific engines the maximum limits for each site is usually just different enough to drive us nuts and require editing in order to complete the submission. This is not an easy task, but it’s even harder when the description is 400-something characters long!