Title and Meta Description TAG

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

• 
  Pablo Caño: Hi everyone!
  
  Two Questions for you all (again around the Title and Meta Description TAG):
  
  In your opinion, is better to try to write short meta titles with some keywords or is better to write a big one with more keywords. Try an example. In the case of elections in Argentina 2015, you would write only "Elections Argentina 2015" or would attempt to write a title longer, like "Elections Argentina 2015: candidates, dates ..."
  
  And what would you do with the Meta Description? It is a url with many articles, so you would leave it empty and leave Google to take the meta description automatically?
  
  What would you do?
  Curious to hear your thoughts! ;)
• 
  PromozSEO: Page titles should be maximum 60 chars long, main keyword should be in the page title, can be descriptive.
  It is better to leave meta descriptions blank than to write duplicate meta descriptions but indeed it is not suggested. Write page specific and descriptive meta description in 150 chars max, place the main terms and make it appealing to get maximum clicks from SERP.
  Google may find and show more relevant part of texts from the content depending on the search query.
• 
  Elisabeth Bobeck: I would not even make them 60 characters long, in some cases, for Realtors, some of our IDX systems add characters after , I would look at 55 or 50 as the max. Use the best keywords possible. Don't forget to use the titles for your Alt-Tags for pictures, so the spiders can find your images too.
• 
  Tony McCreath: Technically the title tag displayed in Desktop Search results is limited to 512px.
  
  But don't just think about that. The title is also used by Facebook, twitter and many other social engines that share content.
  
  Write to what will look good for the viewer and encourage them to click. Then think about keywords.
  
  I find Google sometimes adds to titles that are too short or likes to change things around. If they do that I play with the title to see if I can gain control.
  
  +Elisabeth Bobeck ; Your mixing a few things up with the images. The alt ATTRIBUTE does help with image searches but the last I heard the title attribute probably does not.
• 
  Richard Hearne: Short titles, and probably a description which provides details of what the page includes.
• 
  Edwin Jonk: It is a url with many articles
  
  I guess it is a category page with articles about the candidates. In that case, I wouldn't mention all the candidates, but I would mention which election, for example the congressional election . I would also keep the year in the title (as you suggested). That way, it is clear for both bots and users which election the category is about.
  
  With regard to dates in the title. I would don't a full date, like 25 October 2015. In this case, the year might make sense but for sure you are wasting space if you would use the full date. Furthermore, on the articles you can markup the date (datePublished) which might show as a rich snippet. ;
  https://developers.google.com/structured-data/rich-snippets/articles