The tags that actually matter
A page needs surprisingly few meta tags to be well formed: a title, a description, a canonical URL, a viewport tag, and the Open Graph set that social platforms read when someone shares the link. Everything else is optional, and one of the most famous — the keywords tag — has been ignored by Google since 2009. This generator writes the useful set and skips the folklore.
Title and description length
Google renders roughly 580 pixels of title, which works out to about 55–60 characters for most fonts, and around 155–160 characters of description. Beyond that your text is cut with an ellipsis. The counters here flag those thresholds as you type. Worth knowing: Google rewrites descriptions for a large share of queries anyway, so treat the description as a strong suggestion for the snippet rather than a guarantee — and put the important words first, where they survive truncation.
Open Graph and Twitter Cards
Facebook, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Slack and Discord all read Open Graph tags. X reads its own twitter: tags but falls back to Open Graph when they are missing — which is why this generator writes only the twitter tags that add something (card and site) rather than duplicating everything. Your share image should be an absolute URL, at least 1200×630 pixels, and under about 5 MB; relative paths are the single most common reason a share preview shows no image.
Canonical URLs stop duplicate-content problems
A canonical tag tells search engines which version of a page is the real one when the same content is reachable at several addresses — with and without a trailing slash, with tracking parameters, or on both http and https. Point it at the absolute, preferred URL of the page it sits on. A canonical that points somewhere else, or a whole site canonicalised to its homepage, will quietly remove your pages from search results.
Benefits
- Writes a complete head block: SEO tags, canonical, Open Graph and Twitter Card, in a sensible order.
- Live character counters flag titles and descriptions that will be truncated in search results.
- Warns about the mistakes that break share previews, such as a relative image URL.
- Escapes quotes and angle brackets, so a title containing punctuation cannot break your markup.
Limitations to know
- Search engines frequently rewrite the description they show, so the tag is a suggestion rather than a guarantee.
- It generates tags but cannot check whether the URLs or the image actually resolve.
- It does not produce structured data (JSON-LD), which is a separate part of technical SEO.
Common mistakes to avoid
- Pointing every page canonical at the homepage, which removes the rest of the site from search results.
- Adding a keywords tag and expecting a ranking benefit — Google has ignored it since 2009.
- Using a relative path for the share image, the single most common reason a link previews with no picture.
Alternatives
To see how the tags render as a share card, use the Open Graph Preview. To control crawling, use the robots.txt Generator, and to check any length limit use the Character Counter.
Last updated: August 2026 · Reviewed by the AI Toolbox editorial team.
Frequently asked questions
Do meta keywords still help?
No. Google has ignored the keywords meta tag since 2009 and stuffing it can look spammy, so this generator does not write one.
Where do these tags go?
Inside the head element, ideally near the top and before any scripts, so crawlers and social scrapers find them without parsing the whole document.
Why is my share image not appearing?
Usually because the URL is relative rather than absolute, the image is behind a login, or the platform cached an earlier version. Re-scrape the URL with the platform debugger after fixing it.
Should every page have a canonical tag?
It is good practice. Self-referencing canonicals are harmless and protect you when a URL is shared with tracking parameters attached.