Meta Tag Generator

A meta tag generator writes the tags that belong in the head of every web page: the ones that tell search engines what the page is called, how to describe it and whether to index it, and the ones that control how the page looks when it is shared on social media. Our free tool builds the title, meta description, canonical, robots, viewport and charset tags, plus Open Graph tags with the en_GB locale and X card tags. Length meters help you stay within sensible limits, a social card preview shows roughly how a share will look, and you can copy the complete HTML in one click. It runs in your browser and nothing is stored.

How to use the Meta tag generator

1. 1 Write the title and descriptionEnter a unique page title and a meta description. Watch the length meters and put the most important words first.
2. 2 Set the canonical and robots optionsAdd the preferred URL for the page as the canonical, and choose index or noindex and follow or nofollow. Most public pages should be index, follow.
3. 3 Fill in the Open Graph detailsAdd the share title, description, image URL, page URL, type and site name. The locale defaults to en_GB for UK sites.
4. 4 Add the X card settingsKeep the summary_large_image card for a big image preview and add your business's X handle if you have one.
5. 5 Preview, copy and checkCheck the social card preview, copy the HTML into your page head, then confirm the live page with our Meta Tag Checker.

What meta tags do and which ones matter

Meta tags are snippets of HTML in the head of a page that browsers, search engines and social platforms read but visitors do not see directly. A small number of them do real work today. The title tag and meta description shape your search result, the robots tag controls indexing, the canonical tag points to the preferred version of a page, the viewport tag makes the page display properly on phones, and the charset tag makes sure characters such as £ and é render correctly.

Many older tags are now useless. Google has ignored the meta keywords tag for years, and tags such as revisit-after, distribution and rating have no effect on Google. This generator leaves them out so your head section stays short and clean.

Every page on your site should have its own set. Templates and themes sometimes give every page the same title and description, or the home page's Open Graph image, which makes shared links and search results look identical. Use the generator as a checklist for each important page, especially service pages, location pages and your most-shared blog posts.

Title tags and meta descriptions

The title tag is one of the strongest on-page signals of what a page is about, and it usually becomes the blue link in search results. Make every title unique, put the main topic first and your brand last, and keep it to roughly 50 to 60 characters. Google truncates by pixel width rather than characters, so treat the meter as a guide and test important titles in our SERP Snippet Preview.

The meta description does not affect rankings directly, but a good one can earn more clicks. Aim for about 140 to 160 characters that tell the searcher what they will find and why they should choose you. Google often rewrites descriptions using page text when it thinks that matches the search better, so write an accurate summary rather than a list of keywords.

Canonical, robots, viewport and charset

These four tags are quick to set and costly to get wrong.

• Canonical: the full, preferred URL of the page, including https:// and your chosen www or non-www version. It helps search engines consolidate duplicates such as URLs with tracking parameters.
• Robots index, follow: the default for public pages. You do not strictly need the tag for this, but stating it does no harm.
• Robots noindex: keeps a page out of search results, for example thank-you pages, internal search results or thin filter pages. The page must stay crawlable for search engines to see the tag.
• Robots nofollow: tells search engines not to follow links on the page. Rarely needed on normal pages.
• Viewport width=device-width, initial-scale=1: essential for mobile-friendly pages.
• Charset UTF-8: should be the first tag in the head so every character displays correctly.

Open Graph tags for social sharing

Open Graph tags control the title, description and image shown when a page is shared on Facebook, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Slack and many other apps. Without them, platforms guess, often picking a logo, a cookie banner image or no image at all. The generator outputs og:title, og:description, og:image, og:url, og:type, og:site_name and og:locale, which is set to en_GB for UK English sites.

Use a full, absolute image URL starting with https://. An image of 1200 by 630 pixels works well across the main platforms; keep text and faces away from the edges because some apps crop to a square or a narrower ratio. Use og:type website for most pages and article for blog posts and news. The Open Graph title can be a little more conversational than the title tag, since it appears in a social feed rather than a list of search results.

Keep the image file reasonably small, ideally a compressed JPG or PNG well under a few megabytes, so platforms fetch it reliably. Make sure the image URL is publicly accessible and not blocked by robots.txt or a login, or the platform will show the share without a picture.

X (Twitter) card tags

X reads its own card tags first and falls back to Open Graph for anything missing. The generator sets twitter:card to summary_large_image, which shows a wide image above the title, and adds twitter:site with your business handle if you enter one. The title, description and image are usually covered by the Open Graph tags, which keeps duplication to a minimum.

Social platforms cache link previews. If you change your tags after a page has been shared, the old preview may keep appearing for a while. Facebook's Sharing Debugger and LinkedIn's Post Inspector let you ask those platforms to fetch the page again.

Adding the tags to your site

Paste the generated HTML inside the head element of the page, replacing any existing versions of the same tags. Duplicate titles, descriptions or canonical tags send mixed signals, and search engines may ignore them or pick the wrong one.

If you use WordPress with an SEO plugin such as Yoast SEO or Rank Math, enter the title, description, canonical and social details in the plugin's fields for each page rather than pasting raw HTML, as the plugin already outputs these tags. Shopify, Wix and Squarespace also have SEO and social sharing settings for each page. Once the page is live, run it through our Meta Tag Checker to make sure each tag appears exactly once and is correctly formed.

Examples you can copy

<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
<title>Boiler Repair in Leeds | Same-Day Callouts | Smith Heating</title>
<meta name="description" content="Gas Safe registered engineers fixing all major boiler brands across Leeds. Same-day callouts and fixed prices.">
<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.example.co.uk/boiler-repair/leeds/">
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow">
<meta property="og:type" content="website">
<meta property="og:site_name" content="Smith Heating">
<meta property="og:locale" content="en_GB">
<meta property="og:title" content="Boiler broken? Same-day repairs across Leeds">
<meta property="og:description" content="Gas Safe registered engineers, fixed prices and a 12-month guarantee on repairs.">
<meta property="og:url" content="https://www.example.co.uk/boiler-repair/leeds/">
<meta property="og:image" content="https://www.example.co.uk/images/boiler-repair-leeds-1200x630.jpg">
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@example">

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">

Common mistakes to avoid

Frequently asked questions