Meta Tag Generator

How to use Meta Tag Generator

1. Enter your page title, description and canonical URL.
2. Set the robots directive if the page should not be indexed.
3. Copy the block into your head, above any scripts.
4. Check the rendered source of the live page, not just the template.
5. Titles truncate around 55–60 characters and descriptions around 150–160 — both by pixel width, not character count.
6. Canonical URLs must be absolute and must resolve with a 200 status.
7. The keywords meta tag does nothing; leave it out.

Title and description are advertising copy, not labels

The title is the clickable line in a search result and the single strongest on-page signal you control. Google truncates by pixel width at roughly 600px, which is about 55–60 characters, so the distinguishing words go first and the brand goes last. The description is not a ranking factor and it is the copy that persuades someone to click — 150–160 characters, written as a promise the page keeps. Google rewrites descriptions perhaps 70% of the time, more often when yours does not match the query, which is an argument for writing one that does rather than for skipping it.

The canonical tag prevents you competing with yourself

The same content reachable at several URLs — with and without a trailing slash, with tracking parameters, with and without www — splits ranking signals between them. A canonical tag names the version you want indexed and consolidates the rest into it. Use an absolute URL, make every page self-canonical by default, and make sure the canonical points at a page that actually returns 200: a canonical to a redirect or a 404 is ignored, and the page is treated as having none.

The robots tag, and its difference from robots.txt

<meta name="robots" content="noindex"> removes a page from search results, and works only if the crawler can reach the page to read it. That is why disallowing a page in robots.txt while also trying to noindex it fails — the crawler never sees the tag. Other useful values: nofollow for links you do not endorse, noarchive to suppress the cached copy, and max-snippet to control how much text can be shown.

The meta tags that no longer do anything

The keywords meta tag has been ignored by Google since 2009 and by Bing for almost as long; filling it in signals nothing except that the page was built from an old checklist. Meta author, revisit-after and distribution are equally inert for search. The tags that genuinely matter are few: title, description, canonical, viewport, robots, and the Open Graph set for social sharing.