Meta tags that matter for SEO
- Title tag: strictly its own element rather than a meta tag, but always listed with them. It is the page’s name in search results and browser tabs.
- Meta description: a summary that search engines may show under the title in results.
- Meta robots: instructions such as noindex (keep this page out of search results) or nofollow (don’t follow the links on this page).
- Viewport: tells mobile browsers how to size the page. Essential for a mobile-friendly site.
- Charset: the character encoding of the page, usually UTF-8.
- Open Graph and Twitter Card tags: control the title, description and image shown when the page is shared on social media.
Meta tags search engines ignore
Google has ignored the meta keywords tag for ranking since 2009, and Bing has treated heavy use of it as a spam signal. You can leave it out.
Meta tags example
The head of a typical page might contain a charset tag (UTF-8), a viewport tag so the page fits a phone, a title, a meta description of about 150 characters, a robots tag (index, follow), a canonical link and Open Graph tags that set the title and image shown when the page is shared on social media. Visitors never see them, but browsers, search engines and social platforms read them.
Meta tags checklist
- Every page has a unique title tag and meta description.
- The viewport tag is present so the page works on mobile.
- Pages that should not appear in search have a noindex robots tag, and are not blocked in robots.txt.
- Canonical tags point to the preferred URL.
- Social sharing tags have an image of the right size.
- No leftover noindex tags from a test site.
Meta tags mistakes
- Copying the same title and description to all pages.
- Leaving noindex on after launch.
- Stuffing the description with keywords.
- Believing meta keywords still matter. See meta keywords.
Meta tags FAQs
How do I check my meta tags?
View the page source, use a crawler tool or check the pages report in Search Console. See also our guide to metadata.
Does Google always use my description?
No. It may rewrite it to match the search. See canonical URLs and robots.txt.