Title tags have a hard display limit of approximately 600 pixels in Google's desktop results, which translates to 50–60 characters for most fonts. Going beyond this gets your title cut off with an ellipsis, which kills click-through rate because users can't see your full value proposition. Mobile displays are slightly narrower, so 50 characters is the safer target if your traffic skews mobile. Meta descriptions are trickier because Google rewrites them roughly 70% of the time anyway, pulling content from your page that better matches the specific query. The standard recommendation is 150–160 characters, but Google occasionally shows up to 320 characters for informational queries where context helps. We've tested longer descriptions at Ottawa SEO and found they don't hurt rankings when Google truncates them, but writing tight 155-character versions forces you to front-load your value and call-to-action, which improves CTR when Google does use your text. Keywords meta tag is obsolete and ignored by Google since 2009, so character count is irrelevant there. If you're still populating it for Bing or legacy reasons, keep it under 10 phrases to avoid looking spammy. H1 tags have no character limit from a technical SEO perspective, but readability matters. We keep them under 70 characters because anything longer usually signals you're stuffing keywords or haven't clarified your page topic. Your H1 should match user intent in six to ten words. Image alt text should describe the image accurately in under 125 characters. Screen readers cut off after that, and excessively long alt text gets flagged as keyword stuffing. Describe what's in the image, not what you wish would rank. The common mistake is obsessing over these limits while ignoring whether your tags actually compel clicks. A 58-character title that's generic performs worse than a 62-character title that gets cut by two words but communicates clear value. We prioritize message clarity first, then trim to fit limits without losing meaning.