What HappySEOReports measures
The checker fetches your page and lists the tags in its head: the title, the meta description, the canonical URL, robots directives and the Open Graph and Twitter tags used when your link is shared.
How to read your result
Titles longer than about 60 characters get cut off in search results, and descriptions longer than about 155 do the same. A missing description is not a penalty, but Google will write one for you from the page text, and it rarely picks the sentence you would have. A canonical pointing at a different URL than the one you tested means this page is telling Google to credit another page instead, which is correct sometimes and an accident often.
What to change first
Write a title that leads with what the page is about rather than your business name, and put the business name at the end. Most sites waste the first 20 characters of every title on branding that nobody searches for.
Common questions
- How long should a title tag be?
- Around 50 to 60 characters. Longer titles still work, they just get truncated with an ellipsis in the results.
- Does the meta description affect rankings?
- Not directly. It affects how many people click your result, which matters plenty on its own.
- What does a canonical tag do?
- It tells search engines which URL is the real address for this content when several URLs show the same thing. Pointing it at the wrong page hides the page from search.
Related tests
Run this alongside every other test in Website SEO Tests, or start from the full list of website testing tools.