Find out what Google actually shows when your page comes up

How long should a title tag be?

About 600 pixels wide, which is roughly 55 to 60 lowercase characters but can be as few as 45 if the title is full of capitals.

Google renders titles in a fixed-width column and cuts off whatever does not fit. A W is three times the width of an i, so counting characters is a rough proxy for the thing that actually matters.

This tool weights each character by how wide it really is, which is why it will pass a 62-character lowercase title and fail a 48-character one in caps.

How long should a meta description be?

Between 120 and 160 characters. Shorter and you are giving away space in the result; longer and the end gets cut off.

Meta descriptions are not a ranking factor. They are advertising copy for a listing you have already earned, and their whole job is getting the click rather than the position.

Google rewrites descriptions it thinks do not match the query, which happens often. Writing one specific to the page rather than generic to the site makes that less likely.

Why does it matter if my title and H1 are the same?

Because they are read by different people in different places. The title is a line in a list of ten competing results; the H1 is the first thing somebody sees once they have already clicked.

Identical text usually means one was written with care and the other was copied. It is not a penalty, and plenty of pages rank fine that way, but it is a wasted opportunity: two chances to say something and only one thing said.

Do Open Graph tags affect SEO?

No. They control how a link looks when it is shared on Facebook, LinkedIn, WhatsApp and X, which affects clicks rather than rankings.

It is still worth getting right. A shared link with no image gets a fraction of the clicks of one with a picture, and the fallback when og:image is missing is usually nothing at all.

Google is showing a different title to the one I wrote. Why?

Google rewrites titles when it thinks its own version matches the query better, which it does for a meaningful share of results.

The most common triggers are titles stuffed with keywords, titles that repeat the brand name at both ends, and titles that are the same across many pages. Fixing those makes a rewrite less likely, though nothing prevents it outright.