Description meta tag: how many characters?

inphurno

Hi everyone I wanted to know what you guys/girls use as the maximum limit for the amount of characters in your Description tag of a page? Some meta tag analysis tools say 250 characters others say 200 characters while I just read in the seomoz.org SEO Web Developer Cheat Sheet that the maximum is 155 characters!

So what do you use as your limit cause I was reworking my Meta tags to improve them but I don't want to have to much text and then have a negative effect on my ranking. Btw as a second question, how bad is it to have extra characters in any of the tags description, keywords or title?

Thanks in advance! Smile

Peterssidan

I don't use the description tag very often but if you look at how much of the description tag text google is showing in the SERP it looks like the 155 characters limit are correct. I don't know if your ranking is affected negative if you have more characters but I don't think it's a sharp line between good and bad.

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