title: the strongest on-page element. Keep it 50β60 characters, lead with the main keyword, and make every page's title unique.
description: not a ranking factor, but it drives click-through rate. Summarize the page's value in 150β160 characters and Google is more likely to display it verbatim.
Common misconceptions
The `keywords` meta tag has been ignored by Google since 2009 β don't spend time on it.
`robots` `noindex` is powerful: accidentally shipping it removes the page from search. Check before every deploy.
OG tags are a separate system
What Slack, iMessage, or Facebook show when a link is shared comes from `og:title` and `og:image`, not your search title. Maintain both.
Frequently Asked Questions
Meta tags are HTML elements that provide metadata about a web page. They help search engines understand your page content, influence how your page appears in search results, and control how your content is shared on social media. Key meta tags include title, description, and robots tags.
The recommended length for a meta title is 50-60 characters, and for a meta description it's 150-160 characters. Exceeding these limits may cause your text to be truncated in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Open Graph (OG) tags are meta tags that control how your content appears when shared on social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and others. They define the title, description, image, and URL that appear in social media cards and previews.
Twitter Cards are meta tags specific to Twitter (now X) that define how your content appears when shared on the platform. While similar to Open Graph, Twitter Cards have unique properties like card type (summary vs. summary_large_image) and use the 'twitter:' prefix instead of 'og:'.
The robots meta tag tells search engine crawlers whether to index your page and follow its links. 'index, follow' (default) allows full indexing. 'noindex' prevents the page from appearing in search results. 'nofollow' tells crawlers not to follow links on the page.
A canonical URL (rel='canonical') tells search engines which version of a page is the 'main' one when duplicate or similar content exists at multiple URLs. Use it to prevent duplicate content issues and consolidate SEO value to a single URL.
While Twitter can fall back to Open Graph tags, it's recommended to include both for optimal control. Twitter Card tags take precedence on Twitter/X, while Open Graph tags are used by Facebook, LinkedIn, and most other platforms.
For Open Graph, the recommended image size is 1200Γ630 pixels. For Twitter summary_large_image cards, use 1200Γ628 pixels. For summary cards, use 144Γ144 to 4096Γ4096 pixels. Images should be under 5MB in size.
You can test your meta tags using Facebook's Sharing Debugger (developers.facebook.com/tools/debug), Twitter Card Validator, Google's Rich Results Test, and LinkedIn Post Inspector. These tools show exactly how your content will appear when shared.
Google has officially stated it does not use the keywords meta tag as a ranking factor. However, some other search engines like Yandex may still consider them. It's generally low priority but doesn't hurt to include relevant keywords.