I would like to change my meta tags. Not completely different, just altering the wording a little. What, if any, affect will this have on my serp? Will it have a negative impact?
If you change the title, it will have some effect on your SE ranking. Changing your description will not affect your Google ranking - it may have a small effect in Yahoo or MSN (uncertain). Changing other meta tags will have no effect.
Thanks guys. Just curious, is there a certain length se's are looking for title and description tags?
Between 10-40 words I believe it was for the meta description tag, I believe. A good technique to earn yourself some brownie points is by repeating your main keyword(s) in your description, use the below example taken from Aaron Wall's SEO Book site as a good reference: The title (<title>) should be relatively short, containing only your main keyword(s)/company name. I wouldn't bother filling in a company moto or anything along those lines either as I find they are pointless.
Your best bet is to look at the top ranked listings for your search terms and check out the titles of those pages. I think a good rule of thumb is about 60 characters - anything longer than that will be truncated anyway.
Much better point IMO Minstrel; it's not about the number of words but the number of characters - about 60-65 from my experience, and that INCLUDES spaces: This is only 8 words, but too long at 73 characters: This is 10 words and only 58 characters For a more practicle and visual exercise, do a Google Search for "widget information" and you'll see a result from Yahoo with the following title - which is 87 characters including the spaces. Google chops it off after "Your ..." or at 64 characters.