Meta tags are the lines in your page’s code that decide how it looks in Google and what appears when someone shares the link. Fill in the boxes and watch both previews update, then copy the tags.
How it will look
On WordPress you rarely paste this by hand. Rank Math, Yoast and similar plugins write these tags for you, and having both produces duplicates. Use this to see what should be there, or for a page built outside WordPress.
On WordPress? Read this first
If your site runs Rank Math, Yoast or AIOSEO, do not paste these tags into your theme. Your plugin already writes them. Adding a second set gives you two of everything, and search engines then have to pick one, which is a coin toss you did not need to flip.
Use this page instead to work out what your title and description should say, see how they will look, then type those into your plugin’s box. That is the useful part, because no SEO plugin shows you the shared-link preview and most people never see it until the link is already out there.
Pasting the tags directly makes sense for a plain HTML page, a landing page built outside WordPress, or a site with no SEO plugin at all.
What each tag actually does
There are a lot of meta tags in the world and most of them do nothing. These are the ones that matter, roughly in order.
Title
The blue clickable line in Google, and the text in the browser tab. The most important tag on the page by a wide margin.
Google trims it around 60 characters. Not a hard rule, it is actually measured in pixels, so a title full of capitals gets cut sooner. Aim for 60 and put the important words first, because the front survives even when the end does not.
Worth knowing: Google rewrites titles it does not like, and does so fairly often. A title that matches what the page is genuinely about is less likely to be replaced.
Description
The grey text underneath in search results. It is not a ranking factor and has not been for years. What it does is persuade someone to click rather than scroll past, which affects your traffic just as much.
Around 155 characters before it gets trimmed. Google frequently ignores yours entirely and pulls a sentence from your page instead, usually one containing the words the person searched for. Write one anyway, because when it is used it is the only sales pitch you get.
Open Graph tags
These control the card that appears when your link is pasted into Facebook, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Slack or a message. They start with og:.
Without them, your link shows up as a bare blue address with no picture and no text. With them, it becomes a card with an image, a headline and a line of description. The difference in how many people click is not small.
Despite the name, Open Graph was invented by Facebook and is now read by almost everything, including X when Twitter tags are missing.
Twitter tags
The same idea for X. Mostly optional now, because X falls back to your Open Graph tags when these are absent.
The one worth setting is twitter:card. Set to summary_large_image you get a big picture. Left out, you get a small thumbnail. The tool picks the right one based on whether you gave it an image.
Canonical
Says “this is the real address of this page”. It matters when the same content is reachable at more than one address, which happens more than people expect: with and without www, with and without a trailing slash, or with tracking parameters stuck on the end.
Without it, Google may treat those as separate pages and split your ranking between them.
Robots
Only appears if you choose to hide the page. noindex tells search engines to leave it out entirely.
Right for a thank you page, a checkout, or an internal page. Very wrong anywhere else, and it is a surprisingly common way for people to accidentally remove their own site from Google.
The share image
The single thing most people get wrong, because nothing tells you it is wrong.
- Size: 1200 by 630 pixels. That shape fits every platform. Anything squarer gets cropped, usually straight through the middle of your text.
- Use the full address, starting with
https://. A path like/images/share.jpgis meaningless to Facebook, which is fetching it from its own servers, not from a browser sitting on your page. - Keep it under about 5MB or some platforms give up and show nothing.
- Put any text near the middle. Different platforms crop the edges differently, and a headline that runs to the corners will lose its ends somewhere.
No image at all is a real cost. Your link becomes a plain row of text in a feed full of pictures.
My shared link shows the wrong image
Extremely common, and almost never a problem with your tags.
Social platforms fetch your page once and then keep what they found, sometimes for weeks. Change the image and they carry on showing the old one, or the one they grabbed before you set any tags at all.
Each platform has a tool that forces a re-read:
- Facebook and Instagram: the Sharing Debugger. Paste your address, click Scrape Again.
- LinkedIn: the Post Inspector. Same idea.
- X: no longer offers one. It usually refreshes within a day or two on its own.
- WhatsApp: no tool. Adding
?v=2to the end of the address makes it look like a new page, which is a workable trick for testing.
Always run the Facebook debugger once before sharing anything important. It shows exactly what Facebook can see, which is often not what you think you published.
Where the tags go
Inside <head>, which is the section at the top of the page code, before <body>. Tags placed after that point are ignored.
<head>
<title>Your page title</title>
<meta name="description" content="Your description">
... the rest of the tags ...
</head>On WordPress, that section is built by your theme and plugins, which is exactly why you should let your SEO plugin handle it rather than editing theme files.
Checking what you already have
Open any page of your site, right click, choose View Page Source, and press Ctrl+F. Search for og:image.
Nothing found means your links share as bare text. One result means you are set. Two or more results means you have duplicates, usually a theme and an SEO plugin both writing them, and that is worth fixing. Nearly every theme has a setting to turn its own version off.
Questions people ask
Do meta keywords still matter?
No. Google stopped using them in 2009 because people stuffed them with lies. This tool does not generate them for that reason. If a plugin or an agency is still filling them in, they are wasting your time.
Google is showing a different title than the one I set
Google rewrites titles it thinks do not match the page, and there is no way to force it. In practice it happens most when the title is stuffed with keywords, is far too long, or promises something the page does not deliver. A short honest title is rewritten less often.
How long until changes show up in Google?
Days to weeks, depending on how often your site is crawled. You can speed it up by requesting indexing for that page in Search Console.
Should every page have a different title and description?
Yes, and duplicates are one of the most common problems on small sites. Two pages sharing a title tells Google they are the same thing, which is rarely what you meant.
Is the preview here exactly what Google shows?
No, and nothing can be. Google varies the layout by device, by search, and by whatever else is on the results page. It is close enough to judge whether your text fits, which is the question you are actually asking.
My title has quotes in it and the code looks odd
That is correct. Quotes and angle brackets are converted to their HTML equivalents, otherwise a quote would close the tag early and break the markup. The browser turns them back into normal characters when it reads the page.