Two fields, a few dozen characters each, and more folklore attached to them than any other part of on-page SEO. Most of what gets repeated about title tags and meta descriptions was true in 2012. Some of it was never true. Here is what the evidence actually supports, and how to write both so they survive contact with a results page.
Start with what they do and do not do
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The title tag is a ranking factor. A modest one, but real. It is the strongest single on-page signal of what a page is about, and putting the topic in it is not optional.
The meta description is not. Google confirmed this years ago and has repeated it since. It has never been used in ranking. It exists to influence whether someone clicks.
Click-through rate is not a direct ranking factor either. This one gets asserted constantly — the earlier version of this article asserted it — and Google has denied it consistently. Clicks feed evaluation systems, not the ranking of your individual page in real time. Write descriptions to earn clicks because clicks are visitors and visitors are the point, not because you are gaming a signal that does not exist.
Google will probably rewrite both anyway
This is the part that changes how you should think about the whole exercise.
Since Google’s title update in August 2021, Google routinely replaces the title tag you wrote with something it assembles from your H1, your anchor text, your site name, or the visible text on the page. Independent studies of large page samples put the rewrite rate somewhere between a third and two thirds — the range is wide because methodologies differ, but no study found it rare.
Meta descriptions are rewritten more often still. Google generates its own snippet whenever it thinks a passage from the page answers the query better than your description does — which, for long-tail queries, is most of the time.
Two conclusions follow, and they point in opposite directions from the usual advice.
First, stop optimizing these to the character. Agonising over whether a title is 58 or 61 characters is effort spent on something Google may discard.
Second, the way to keep your version is to make it obviously the best available option. Google rewrites titles that are stuffed with keywords, padded with boilerplate, duplicated across pages, or that contradict the H1. A title that accurately and concisely describes the page usually survives, because there is nothing better for Google to substitute.
Length, properly explained
Titles are not truncated at a character count. They are truncated at a pixel width, around 600 pixels on desktop. This is why the advice varies between 50 and 70 characters depending on who wrote it — it depends entirely on which characters.
A title of capital Ms and Ws runs out of room far sooner than one of lowercase i and l. In practice, 55 to 60 characters is the range that almost always fits, and that is the number worth working to.
Meta descriptions truncate at roughly 155 to 160 characters on desktop and closer to 120 on mobile. Since most traffic is mobile for most sites, front-load the part that matters into the first 120 characters and treat the rest as a bonus that may not be shown.
The site name problem
Nearly every CMS appends your site name to every title: Page Title | Site Name. This is fine when the site name is short. It is a real problem when it is long.
A site called “Expert Web Audit” costs you 19 characters including the separator — acceptable. A site whose name is a full sentence — “Stop Losing Revenue: Expert Web Performance and Technical SEO Audit” — costs 68 characters, which is more than the entire visible title. Every page on such a site shows a truncated headline and never shows the brand.
If your site name is long, either shorten it in Settings → General, or remove it from the title template in your SEO plugin. Both are one change that improves every page at once, which makes it the highest-leverage thing on this page.
Writing a title that works
Put the topic first. Truncation eats the end, so what matters goes at the front. “Redirect chains: how to find and fix them” survives truncation. “The complete 2026 guide to finding and fixing redirect chains” does not.
Make it unique. Duplicate titles across pages are one of the reliable triggers for a Google rewrite, and they make your own analytics harder to read. A crawler will find these in minutes.
Match the H1, roughly. They do not need to be identical, but a title that promises something the page does not visibly deliver is a rewrite candidate.
Skip the year unless it earns its place. Titles carrying “2025/2026” date themselves the moment the year turns and require editing forever. Use it for genuinely time-sensitive content and nowhere else.
Drop the adjectives. Ultimate, complete, definitive, essential — they take space, add nothing, and appear in every competing result. Specificity outperforms enthusiasm: “How to fix redirects, chains and broken URLs” beats “The ultimate guide to redirects” because it tells you what is inside.
Writing a description that survives
The description is a two-line advertisement in a list of ten. Three things make it work.
Answer the implied question. Someone searching “missing canonical tag” wants to know what to do about it. Tell them the page tells them, rather than announcing the topic they already know.
Say something concrete. A number, a constraint, a specific claim. “How canonical tags, 301s and WordPress settings consolidate them” is a promise about content. “Learn everything about duplicate content in our comprehensive guide” is not.
Include the terms someone would search. Not for ranking — the description is not a ranking factor — but because Google bolds matched query terms in the snippet, and bold text draws the eye.
What to avoid: opening every description with “Discover how” or “Learn why”. Where a site has a hundred posts all starting the same way, anyone who sees two of your results at once sees a template, and a template reads as automated.
Finding the ones that need work
Crawl the site. Screaming Frog reports missing titles, duplicate titles, titles over 60 characters, and the same for descriptions. This is a ten-minute job that gives you the full list.
Sort Search Console by impressions. Open the Performance report, sort pages by impressions, and start at the top. A page with high impressions and near-zero clicks is a page whose snippet is failing — it is being shown and passed over. That is a much better prioritization than working alphabetically through a crawl.
Search for your own pages. The definitive test is what Google actually renders. If the title in the results is not the title you wrote, Google has rewritten it, and that tells you more than any tool.
Setting them in WordPress
Rank Math, Yoast and SEOPress all offer a per-post SEO title and description field, plus site-wide templates for anything you have not set individually.
Two decisions worth making once:
The default description template. Most plugins default to using the post excerpt. This works only if your excerpts are written as search snippets — under 155 characters, with a reason to click. Excerpts written as article summaries make bad descriptions, and they are usually far too long.
The title separator and site name. Set once, applies everywhere. If the site name is long, this is where you fix it.
Both plugins show a live pixel-width preview as you type, which is more useful than any character counter, since pixel width is what actually decides truncation.
The short version
Titles rank a little, descriptions do not rank at all, and Google rewrites both often enough that precision to the character is wasted effort. Keep titles near 55 to 60 characters with the topic first and no padding. Keep descriptions under 155, front-loaded for mobile, saying something specific. Shorten your site name if it is eating the title. Then sort Search Console by impressions and fix the pages that are already being shown and ignored — those are the only ones where this work pays back quickly.
The equivalent job for social platforms is done by a separate set of tags, covered in Open Graph and Twitter Card tags — they control how your link looks when somebody shares it, and they are not the same fields.
Working through this list on your own site and would rather not? That is what an Expert Web Audit is for.
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