Meta Tag Tools

Meta tags control how a page is represented somewhere other than the page itself — in a search result or a shared link preview. They do not change the content, but they largely determine whether anyone clicks it.

Getting the lengths right

Google truncates by pixel width rather than character count, so a title of wide capitals runs out of room sooner than one of narrow lowercase. As a working guide, keep titles under about 60 characters and descriptions between 120 and 160. Check the preview rather than trusting a character count.

Worth knowing: the meta description is not a ranking factor, and Google rewrites it for the majority of queries when it judges a passage from the page to be a better answer. Treat yours as a strong suggestion. The meta keywords tag does nothing at all — Google has ignored it since 2009.

Social previews

The Open Graph Preview tool shows how a link will render when shared. Use a 1200 × 630 pixel image, a 1.91:1 ratio that works across Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter/X large cards, and keep essential text away from the edges since platforms crop differently. og:image must be an absolute URL — a relative path fails because the crawler has no page context to resolve it against.

If an old image persists after you update a page, that is platform caching. Facebook's Sharing Debugger and LinkedIn's Post Inspector will force a re-scrape.

Two tags that matter more than they look

A canonical tag names the preferred URL when the same content is reachable at several addresses, consolidating ranking signals onto one. And a viewport tag is required for any responsive site — without it, mobile browsers render at a virtual desktop width and scale down.