How long should a page meta description be?
Michael Cyger
[ Admin ]
Ask this question to 10 SEO professionals and you’ll get 11+ opinions. There is no one exact answer because each search engine treats this meta tag differently. Some use it for display on the search results, while others only use it to make sure it matches the content of the page for their ranking algorithm.
In general, I’d say to stick to around these numbers for these search engines:
Google: 160 characters (including spaces)
Yahoo: 177
Bing: 173
AOL: 155
If you were optimizing for all of them, just stick to the shortest quantity…or better yet, standardize on 150 characters, including spaces, or less and if you need to go over by a few characters it’s no big deal. I’ve used this strategy with my content editors in the past and it’s worked really well.