Meta Tags for SEO: Which Ones Matter and Which Don't

Which meta tags actually matter

Meta tags are service lines in a page's <head> read by search engines, browsers and social networks. They are not equally useful:

Title: the page's most important tag

Title is one of the strongest on-page signals. It appears as the headline in search results, although the search engine may rewrite it if it finds it unhelpful.

How to write it:

• unique for every page;
• the key point first, the main query included naturally, not as a list;
• short enough not to be truncated in results;
• the brand name at the end, after a separator.

Description: for clicks, not rankings

Meta description does not affect ranking directly, but it is often used as the snippet text. A good description increases the chance users pick your link.

• Describe what the reader will find on the page in one or two sentences.
• Write a unique description for each page.
• Do not repeat the title or list keywords.

The search engine may replace your description with a passage from the page if it answers the query better. That is normal.

Robots: controlling indexing

meta robots tells the search engine what to do with the page:

• noindex: do not show it in results;
• nofollow: do not follow links from the page.

Typical uses are service pages, internal search results and the cart. A common mistake is leaving noindex from a staging environment and shipping it to the live site.

Important: if a page is blocked in robots.txt, the crawler cannot see its noindex. To remove a page from the index, it must stay crawlable.

Viewport: the mobile version

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

Without this tag, mobile browsers render the page as a shrunken desktop layout. Search engines primarily evaluate the mobile version, so the tag is mandatory.

Open Graph: how links look when shared

The og:title, og:description, og:image and og:url tags define link previews in Telegram, Facebook, LinkedIn and other services. They do not affect rankings, but they strongly affect whether people click a shared link. X (Twitter) additionally uses twitter:card tags.

<meta property="og:title" content="Page title">
<meta property="og:description" content="Short description">
<meta property="og:image" content="https://example.com/cover.png">

Keywords: an obsolete tag

meta keywords once listed a page's keywords. Because it was abused, Google stopped using it for ranking long ago. There is no need to fill it in, and a long list of keywords can reveal your keyword strategy to competitors.

Common mistakes

• The same title and description across many pages.
• An empty title, or one that just says "Home".
• An accidental noindex on important pages.
• No og:image, so the link looks empty in messengers.
• Keyword stuffing in the title.