Here is a very quick and easy excel formula to use if your are writing a lot of Meta Descriptions or Title Tags.

Whilst Meta description tags, might not count towards search engine rankings.  They can influence how your snippet appears in Google.  This snippet is your opportunity to sell and your chance to persuade the customer to click on your link.

Space is tight on the Google Results Page (SERP) about 156 characters, including spaces for each entry (website).

An effective meta description and Title Tags needs to include your keywords and a compelling reason to click – Free Delivery works wonders.  Also making sure that the copy is relevant to the landing page is so important.  And importantly is should be around 156 characters in length, including spaces.

Excel can help with that.

=LEN(A1)

If I have lots of descriptions to write up I will always use Excel.  Then beside the description I will include the LEN formula to count the characters.  This will tell me whether it is too long or not.

So the LEN function finds the referenced cell, counts the characters and returns a value.

The next step would be to copy the formula in cell B1, c1 etc.