Generate SEO meta tags free, with live preview. Learn which tags still matter, exact character limits, and which ones search engines stopped reading years ago.
Meta tags are HTML elements in a page's <head> that describe the page to browsers, search engines, and social platforms. Only a handful still affect anything. Most of the tags people copy into templates keywords, author, revisit-after have been ignored by search engines for years. Here's the working set, and what each one actually does. Try the free Meta Tag Generator → The Tags That Matter Title tag html <title>Free Meta Tag Generator: Title, Description & OG Tags</title> Not technically a meta tag, but the most important element in the head. It's what appears as the clickable headline in search results and the primary on-page signal of what a page covers. Limit: around 60 characters before Google truncates it. Front-load the important words a title cut mid-phrase loses exactly the part you cared about. Meta description html <meta name="description" content="Generate SEO meta tags free, with live preview..."> Not a ranking factor. It is a click-through factor: it's the snippet under your title in search results, and a compelling one earns clicks a bland one doesn't. Limit: roughly 155–160 characters. Google frequently rewrites descriptions to match the specific query anyway write one that works well when it's used, and don't over-engineer it. Viewport html <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> Tells mobile browsers to render at device width instead of simulating a desktop screen. Without it, a responsive site displays zoomed-out and unusable on phones. Since ranking is based on the mobile version of a page, a missing viewport tag is a genuine problem, not a cosmetic one. Charset html <meta charset="UTF-8"> Declares the character encoding. Missing or wrong, and accented characters, symbols, and non-Latin scripts render as garbage. Must appear early in the <head> . Canonical html <link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/page"> A link element rather than a meta tag, but it belongs in this list. It tells search engines which URL is the authoritative version when the same content is reachable at several addresses — with and without trailing slashes, with tracking parameters, or across paginated views. Prevents duplicate content from splitting ranking signals. Robots html <meta name="robots" content="index, follow"> Controls whether a page may be indexed and whether its links should be followed. noindex is the tag to reach for on thank-you pages, internal search results, and thin duplicate pages you don't want in search results. Open Graph and Twitter Cards These control how a page appears when shared on social platforms and in messaging apps. Without them, shares render as a bare URL with whatever image the platform happens to scrape. html <meta property="og:title" content="Page title for social"> <meta property="og:description" content="Short description for social"> <meta property="og:image" content="https://example.com/image.jpg"> <meta property="og:url" content="https://example.com/page"> <meta property="og:type" content="website"> Image sizing: 1200×630 pixels is the safe standard, and keep it under about 5 MB. Below roughly 600×315 the platform falls back to a small thumbnail instead of a large card. Twitter Cards use their own namespace but fall back to Open Graph values when absent, so the main one worth adding explicitly is: html <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image"> Verify the result with the Open Graph Preview before publishing social platforms cache aggressively, and a broken preview from launch day can persist for a long time. Tags You Can Stop Adding Tag Status meta keywords Ignored by Google since 2009. Adds nothing. meta author No search impact. meta revisit-after Never supported by any major crawler. meta rating No meaningful effect. meta distribution Legacy, ignored. meta generator Informational only, tells search engines nothing useful. None of these harm you they're just noise inherited from templates written a decade ago. Character Limits at a Glance Element Limit Notes Title tag ~60 characters Pixel-width based; wide characters truncate sooner Meta description ~155–160 characters Often rewritten by Google per query OG title ~60 characters Can differ from the SEO title OG description ~110 characters Shorter than the meta description OG image 1200×630 px Under 5 MB Check lengths with a character counter before publishing rather than guessing truncation is invisible until it's live. A Common Mistake: Identical Title and H1 The title tag and the on-page H1 serve different jobs. The title is written for the search results page it needs to earn a click from a list of ten options. The H1 is read by someone who has already arrived, and can be longer, more descriptive, or more conversational. Making them identical wastes an opportunity to target a second phrasing and to write a headline that actually suits the page. Frequently Asked Questions How lon