Meta Tag Generator

How the Meta Tag Generator works

Meta tag generator: the essential tags

Meta tags are the page's conversation with browsers and crawlers before any content is read. Some affect rendering, some affect indexing, and several are ignored entirely by modern search engines despite appearing in every tutorial. This tool writes the ones that matter, in the order that matters, and leaves out the ones that do not.

Charset and viewport. <meta charset> should be the first thing in <head> and within the first 1024 bytes of the document, because the browser needs the encoding before it can read anything else. UTF-8 is the only sensible choice for a new page. The viewport tag makes the page render at device width on phones; without it mobile browsers assume a desktop layout and shrink it. The viewport-fit=cover variant lets the page extend behind notches and rounded corners on phones when your CSS handles the safe-area insets.

Title and description. The title is the most important on-page ranking factor and the headline of the search result. Around 60 characters is safe before truncation; the tool warns above that. The description does not affect ranking but is the snippet under the headline when Google decides it fits the query, so write it as a sentence that earns the click. Keep it under 160 characters; under 70 wastes space. If you need help drafting one from page text, the Meta Description Generator on this site does that.

Keywords and author. The keywords tag has not been used for ranking by Google since 2009 or by Bing since 2014, and it can hand competitors a list of your targets. It is here because some internal search systems and CMS templates still read it; leave it blank unless you know something does. author is harmless and used by a few reader tools.

Robots. The robots tag is a comma-separated list of directives, and the defaults — index, follow — do not need writing unless a tool or checklist insists, which the explicit option covers. noindex keeps the page out of results while still passing link equity; nofollow stops crawlers following links on the page. max-snippet limits the text preview, max-image-preview controls how large an image thumbnail can appear, noarchive suppresses the cached copy and notranslate hides the translate offer. Robots tags apply per page; for site-wide rules use robots.txt, but remember that robots.txt blocks crawling and cannot remove an already-indexed URL, whereas noindex can.

Canonical. <link rel="canonical"> tells search engines which URL is the definitive one when the same content is reachable at several addresses — with and without trailing slash, with tracking parameters, over HTTP and HTTPS. It must be absolute and should be self-referencing on the canonical page itself. The Canonical URL Generator on this site helps when the rules are more involved.

The rest. theme-color tints the browser chrome on Android and in some desktop browsers. referrer sets the default referrer policy for outgoing requests; strict-origin-when-cross-origin is the modern browser default and a sensible explicit choice. format-detection stops iOS Safari turning anything that looks like a phone number into a link, which matters on pages with prices or IDs. Verification tags are how Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools and others confirm you own the site when you cannot use DNS; type them as google-site-verification = token, one per line.

What is left out. Open Graph and Twitter card tags have their own generator on this site. http-equiv refresh, revisit-after, rating, distribution and expires are ignored by every major engine and omitted here.

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