A hand-built site
Paste the block inside the <head> element, near the top and before any stylesheet. Character encoding in particular wants to be in the first kilobyte of the document.
Free SEO tool
Free SEO Meta Tag Generator
Write every tag a page needs, then see the link card as Facebook, LinkedIn, X, Slack, Discord, iMessage and WhatsApp would actually draw it.
Free · No signup · Seven live previews
Fill in a title to see the Facebook preview.
Copy into your page's <head>
<meta charset="UTF-8"> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> <meta name="robots" content="index, follow"> <meta property="og:type" content="website"> <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">
Every tag the generator writes
Three groups, in the order they come out. Nothing here is padding: each line does a job, and the ones that do no job any more are not generated at all.
The technical set
Character encoding, viewport and robots go out on every page whether or not you touch them, because a page missing any of them has a problem no other tag fixes. Canonical and theme-color appear only once you fill their fields in.
Open Graph
The set almost every app reads when someone pastes your link, Facebook and LinkedIn included. Type is set to website; the rest follow your fields.
Twitter Card
The card type is fixed to summary_large_image, which is the right answer for almost every page. A handle typed without its @ gets one.
See the card before you publish it
One set of tags, read by apps that each draw something different from them. The previews are built from real captures of each platform’s chrome, which is why they crop and truncate in different places rather than showing the same card seven times.
Your domain in capitals above the title, and no description at all. Two of the three fields you just wrote never appear here.
A small square thumbnail beside the title rather than a banner above it, labelled with the bare domain. No description, and it ignores your site name.
X
Two different cards. With an image the title sits over the picture with "From yourdomain.com" beneath; with no image you get a bordered card that does show the description.
Slack
Will not unfurl at all unless there is a title, a description or an image. Given one, your site name and favicon head the card and repeat beneath it.
Discord
The only card that takes a colour from you: the stripe down its left edge is your theme-color value.
iMessage
Image, then title, then the domain in small grey text. No description, so a page with no image is close to a bare link.
The only one of the seven that shows the title, the description and the domain together, and the strictest about the image itself.
This is the social card, not the search result. For how a title and description will read in Google itself, use the SERP preview tool.
How to generate meta tags
- 1
Fetch an existing page, or start empty
Paste a URL and the tool pulls in the title, description, image and site name it already has, so you are editing reality rather than guessing at it.
- 2
Fill in the fields
Title and description carry the most weight. The image, site name and handle decide how the link looks the moment someone shares it.
- 3
Read the card, then the warnings
Seven previews update as you type. The image checks flag an odd aspect ratio and a file big enough for WhatsApp to give up on.
- 4
Copy the block into the head
On a hand-built site it goes inside the head element. On most content systems you will paste nothing at all: the values go into your SEO plugin’s fields instead.
Where the tags actually go
Copying the block is the easy half. Installing it depends entirely on how the site is built, and the most common answer is that you do not paste the block at all.
WordPress and most content systems
Do not paste raw tags. Your SEO plugin already writes them, and a second copy in the head means duplicate tags that readers resolve inconsistently. Use the generated values as the values, and type them into the plugin’s title, description and social fields.
A framework
Modern frameworks want the same values as data rather than as markup, through whatever metadata export or head component they provide. The tag names are identical, so the block reads as a specification for what to put where.
After you ship
Fetch the live URL back into this tool. Plugins and frameworks both have a habit of transforming what you typed, and the only way to know what a page really serves is to read it back.
Which tags are worth setting, and which are dead
Worth the most
The title tag, which is the only meta tag here that search engines treat as a ranking signal, and the canonical, which decides which version of a page they keep. Getting either wrong costs more than every other tag on this page combined.
Worth it for the click, not the rank
The meta description does not rank a page and never has. It is the one sentence you fully control in a search result, which makes it worth writing carefully for a completely different reason.
Dead since 2009
The meta keywords tag. Google announced it had stopped using it, the other major engines followed, and it has done nothing since. This tool does not generate one, which is why you will not find a keywords field in the form.
Quietly decisive
The robots tag. It carries no weight at all until the day it says noindex, at which point it outranks every other signal on the page. That is why it is generated on every page rather than only when you go looking for it.
Common meta tag mistakes
Four that account for most of what goes wrong, and all four survive a review because the markup is valid. Nothing here is a syntax error.
The same description on every page
Usually a template that was filled in once. It is not a penalty, but it wastes the one sentence you fully control on the results page, on every page at once.
A relative image URL
og:image has to be absolute, protocol and all. A path that works perfectly in your markup renders as no image at all in every share.
A noindex left behind after launch
Staging switches it on, launch forgets to switch it off, and the page is invisible for weeks. It is the single most expensive tag on this page to get wrong.
An image nobody can load
Behind a login, blocked by a firewall, or simply too large. The tag is present and correct, and the card still renders blank.
Meta tags and AI answers
Assistants and AI overviews read the same head as everyone else, and they get the same two things from it: a title that says what the page is, and a description that says what it covers. Neither is a magic instruction, and no tag makes a page more likely to be quoted. Writing them accurately simply means the summary drawn from your page describes your page.
The robots tag is the one with real force here. A page carrying noindex is kept out of the index that AI answers are drawn from, which is worth remembering before applying it broadly to thin pages. To see what an AI Overview does to the space above your result, the SERP preview tool renders one at full height.
From one page’s tags to every page’s position
Tags decide how a result looks. Whether the change helped takes position data over time. RankCaddy tracks Google organic and local rankings daily, blends your Analytics and Search Console data into one view, and shows which pages are quietly competing with each other.
Start your 14-day free trialFrom $24 a month for 250 daily keywords, with unlimited projects and users on every plan. No card needed for the trial.
Frequently asked questions
What is a meta tag generator?
A tool that writes the tags in a page’s head from the values you type, instead of leaving you to remember the syntax of each one. This one covers the technical set, Open Graph and the Twitter Card tags, and shows you the link card seven apps would draw from them before you publish.
How do I generate meta tags for my page?
Paste your URL to pull in the tags the page already has, edit the fields, and copy the block. If the page is not live yet, start from empty. Either way the output is the finished block, ready to paste into the head element or into the fields of an SEO plugin.
Which meta tags actually matter for SEO?
The title tag matters most, and it is the only meta tag in this set that search engines treat as a ranking signal. The meta description does not rank a page, but it is the sentence that decides whether the result gets clicked. Canonical and robots matter enormously in a different way: they control whether a page is indexed at all, and which version of it.
Why does this tool not generate a meta keywords tag?
Because Google stopped using it in 2009 and said so publicly, and the other major engines followed. Generating one would add a line to your head that nothing reads, and it hands your keyword list to anyone who views the source. Tools that still offer it are generating a tag for its own sake.
Do meta tags still work?
The useful ones do, and their jobs have separated. Title and description drive how a result looks and whether it is clicked. Canonical and robots control indexing. Open Graph and Twitter Card tags control how a link looks when it is shared, which is a bigger share of traffic for most sites than it was five years ago.
What is Open Graph, and is it free to use?
Open Graph is an open protocol for describing a page to anything that wants to show a preview of it. It is free, there is nothing to sign up for, and it is just tags in your head element. Facebook created it and nearly every messaging and social app now reads it.
What size should an Open Graph image be?
A 1200 by 630 pixel image, which is roughly 1.91 to 1, is the shape almost every platform is built around. This tool warns when the ratio of your image drifts far from that, and again when the file is over about 300KB, because WhatsApp is known to give up on large images and show no preview at all.
Can I pull in the tags from a page I have already published?
Yes. Paste the URL and use Fetch. It reads the page’s title and meta description, falling back to the Open Graph versions where the plain ones are missing, plus the Open Graph image, site name and Twitter handle. You then get the card each platform would draw, and edit from there rather than starting blank.
Is this meta tag generator free?
Yes, with no signup and no credit card. Every field, all seven previews and the full copyable block are available to everyone.