Over at seomofo.com I found a nice little tool. It helps you visualize the way your meta-title, snippet, and Url are displayed in Google:
What does the tool do?
- it displays your title, description, Url, and page size on the fly;
- it calculates how many characters you have left.
It takes a different number of characters than I do: a title-tag has 70 characters (I use 65) and a description has 156 (I use 150). I think Google will occasionally test with different lengths to display, so I usually make them a little bit shorter. This does not mean that a perfect title or description is *always* 70/156 characters long! (just read my ‘for dummies’ posts about that).
Will I use it a lot? No, but it might be useful for people who haven’t looked at the SERPs as often.
I use a spreadsheet program (Excel) to write titles and descriptions. With some simple formulas, you can check the number of characters in a cell and display in the next column. So we’ve set the maximum number of characters for a title on 65. The column next to that displays the number, and colors it red if it becomes higher than 65. This way, you can edit a LOT of titles/descriptions a lot easier.
Sun, Sep 7, 2008
tools