<head> labels telling Google and social apps your page's title, description and preview image. Generate yours free →The essential meta tags
| Tag | What it does |
|---|---|
<title> | The clickable headline in Google results and the browser tab. A confirmed ranking factor — keep it under ~60 characters. |
meta description | The ~155-character summary under the headline. Not a direct ranking factor, but a great description wins clicks. |
og:title / og:description / og:image | Open Graph tags controlling the preview card on Facebook, LinkedIn and WhatsApp. |
twitter:card | Controls the preview on X (Twitter). |
robots | Tells crawlers what to do: index, follow vs noindex. |
viewport | Makes the page mobile-friendly (width=device-width, initial-scale=1). |
charset | Character encoding — almost always UTF-8. |
canonical | Points to the "master" URL when duplicate pages exist. |
Meta tags and SEO
Of all meta tags, the title tag carries the most SEO weight — put your main keyword near its start. The meta description doesn't directly change rankings, but a compelling one raises your click-through rate, and more clicks signal relevance to Google. One honest caveat: Google rewrites titles and descriptions when it thinks it can do better, so treat your tags as strong suggestions, not guarantees.
Open Graph: looking good when shared
Without Open Graph tags, shared links show random text and a cropped or missing image. With them, you control the exact headline, summary and 1200×630 preview image everywhere your link travels — Facebook, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack. For any page you want people to share, og:title, og:description and og:image are non-negotiable.
❓ Meta Tag FAQs
What is a meta tag in HTML?
An element in the <head> section providing metadata — title, description, charset, viewport, social preview info. Invisible to visitors, read by browsers and search engines.
Do meta tags affect SEO?
The title tag is a ranking factor; a good meta description lifts click-through rate. The old "keywords" meta tag is ignored by Google.
What is the ideal meta description length?
About 145–155 characters. Longer text gets truncated with "…" in search results.
What are Open Graph tags?
Meta tags (og:title, og:description, og:image) that control your link's preview card on Facebook, LinkedIn, WhatsApp and more.
Related: What Is JSON? · What Is Base64? · Free Meta Tag Generator