Meta tag checker
Checks titles against 30–60 characters and meta descriptions against 70–160.
What TMOD checks
- Every crawled page's title tag, measured against a 30-character minimum and a 60-character maximum.
- Every meta description, measured against a 70-character minimum and a 160-character maximum.
- Missing titles and missing descriptions, reported per page rather than as a site-wide count.
- Duplicate titles across pages, which usually means a template is not filling in the page-specific part.
Why it matters
The title tag is the strongest on-page relevance signal you directly control, and it is the headline of your search result. It does two jobs at once, and a title written only for one of them usually fails at the other.
The 30–60 character range is about what survives display. Search results truncate on pixel width rather than character count, but 60 characters is a reliable proxy, past it, the end of your title is replaced with an ellipsis, which is where people put the part that would have earned the click. Under 30 characters you are usually leaving relevance on the table.
Meta descriptions do not affect rankings. They affect click-through rate, which affects traffic, and Google frequently rewrites them anyway when it thinks a passage from the page answers the query better. A good description is still worth writing because it is the one you get when the query matches what the page is actually about.
How to fix it
01Front-load the title
Put the distinguishing words first. If the title is truncated, what remains should still identify the page. Brand suffixes belong at the end, and on a site with a long brand name, consider dropping them from deep pages entirely.
02Fix duplicate titles at the template
Identical titles across many pages nearly always means the template is not interpolating the page-specific variable, and the pages behind them are often flagged as near-duplicates for the same underlying reason. That is one change that fixes every affected page at once, so find it before editing pages individually.
03Write descriptions that set an expectation
Say specifically what the page delivers. A description that could apply to any page on any site earns nothing. Include the concrete detail, the number, the format, the constraint, that tells someone this is the right result.
04Let Google write the ones you would not
For pages where a description would just repeat the first paragraph, omitting it is a legitimate choice, Google will generate one from the page, often matched to the query. This check will flag it as missing; that is a warning you can knowingly accept.
Writing a title that survives the result page
Truncation is by pixel width, not character count, so a title full of capitals and wide letters is cut earlier than one of the same length in lowercase. Sixty characters is a proxy that holds up well enough to build a check on, and the practical instruction it stands for is to put the distinguishing words first and let the ellipsis eat something you can afford to lose.
Brand suffixes are the usual candidate. On a homepage the brand is the point; on the four-hundredth article it is fourteen characters of repetition on every result. Dropping it from deep pages is a reasonable choice, and so is shortening it, since nothing requires the title tag to match what your logo says.
Keep the title and the H1 close in meaning but not necessarily identical. The title is written for someone scanning ten results who has not arrived yet; the H1 is written for someone who has. Where they disagree wildly, Google tends to rewrite the title, and where the title promises something the page does not deliver, the click is wasted on both sides.
The rest of the head, and what belongs in it
Four tags do real work beyond the two checked here. The canonical, which decides which URL is the one that counts. The meta robots directive, which is the only reliable way to keep a page out of the index. The viewport, without which a phone renders your desktop layout and scales it down. And the charset declaration, which decides whether the rest of it parses at all.
Open Graph and Twitter card tags do no ranking work whatsoever, and they are still worth having. They control what appears when someone pastes your URL into a message, a post or a chat, and the difference between a card with a title and image and a bare grey link is measured in whether anyone follows it. Structured data is the same shape of investment: no direct ranking effect, and eligibility for result formats you cannot otherwise get. The technical audit covers both.
What does not belong: meta keywords, ignored since 2009. Revisit-after, which no crawler has ever honoured. Author and copyright meta tags, which are inert. A head full of dead tags costs nothing except the impression that the site was configured by copying a tutorial from a decade ago, and it crowds out the four that matter.
Questions
Do meta keywords matter?
No. Google has ignored the meta keywords tag since 2009 and it is not checked here. If your CMS still has a field for it, leaving it empty costs nothing.
Google is showing a different title than the one I set. Why?
Google rewrites titles when it judges its own version more useful for the query, commonly when your title is heavily truncated, keyword-stuffed, or does not match the page's actual content. The fix is not to fight it: a clear, accurate, appropriately short title is rewritten far less often.
Should every page have a unique meta description?
Every page that matters should. Duplicate descriptions across many pages are a signal that the template is generic, and they waste the one piece of result copy you fully control. For low-value pages you would not miss in search, omitting the description is more honest than duplicating one.