Over the last 15 years, the Google SERPs have undergone significant changes. One of the most heavily altered aspects of search engine results pages has been meta tags. Nowadays, some meta tags are essential for the proper functioning of your website, while others are indispensable not only for improving click-through rates and overall SEO. Many others, however, are largely discontinued. Knowing which is which, and how to properly use the ones that remain, is important for a well-functioning site.
Meta Title
Often called the “meta title” in SEO tools and everyday conversation, the page title is technically an HTML <title> element rather than a meta tag.
However, it is commonly analysed alongside meta tags because it also sits within the <head> section of a page and helps search engines understand and present the page in search results.
The title tag specifies the title of your page. This title appears at the top of your web browser, anywhere the post is shared dynamically (such as on Facebook or X), and in any search engine. In general, write your tags for human readers but optimize them with search engines in mind.
Pro tip: Ensure every page has a unique title tag. If two pages share the same title, Google may struggle to determine which page is more relevant for a particular search term. This is different from genuinely duplicate or near-duplicate URLs, where canonical tags can help search engines identify the preferred version.
Meta Description
The description tag is the text in black that appears under your link in Google search results, as well as in other search engines. It also appears when your posts are linked dynamically on social media profiles that generate previews. If you leave the meta description tag blank, Google and other preview generators will create a description for you, often pulling from the first major bit of content on the page.
But is that a good idea? By no means. Meta descriptions are part of your snippet on the SERPs; you can think of it as your motorway signage, basically. This isn’t the place to describe your product; instead, it’s a piece of text meant to include your most important keywords (without keyword stuffing), including long-tail keywords that you couldn’t fit into the meta title due to space limitations. Ideally, if the space allows, it should end with a call to action.
Keep meta descriptions roughly 140-160 characters as a guideline, but Google rewrites snippets often and display length varies by device. Source: Google Search Central
Above all else, ensure the description for every page is completely unique and written with humans in mind.
<head>
<meta name="description" content="Learn which meta tags are essential in 2026, which are obsolete, and how to use them correctly to improve your site's SEO and click-through rates.">
</head>Social Media Meta Attributes
You can customize your meta title, preview image, and meta description specifically for Facebook using the Facebook Open Graph attributes. The meta property og:title, og:image, and og:description tags are used in these cases. Similarly, Twitter Cards can be used for Twitter with meta attributes like twitter:site, twitter:creator, twitter:title, twitter:description, and twitter:image.
Note: Twitter Cards are still referred to as Twitter Cards, even after the rebranding of Twitter to X.
Meta Robots Directives
There are two ways to give crawlers directives:
- robots.txt (which controls access)
- the meta robots tag (which controls behaviour)
Read also: How Search Engines Work
This section focuses on the meta robots tag, which sits in your page’s <head>
There are four attributes that can be used in meta attributes:
- Index: Tells the robot to index the page (default behavior).
- NoIndex: Tells the robot not to index the page (use on system pages, category pages, etc.).
- Follow: Tells the robot to follow and pass PageRank (still an active component of Google’s ranking algorithm) to links on the page.
- NoFollow: Tells the robot not to follow the links on the page.
Index/NoIndex and Follow/NoFollow are mutually exclusive and should be used carefully.
Character Encoding (charset)
Character encoding tells browsers how to interpret and display the text and symbols used on a page. Modern HTML documents should use UTF-8, which supports characters from virtually all written languages.
The recommended HTML5 implementation is:
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
</head>Place the declaration near the beginning of the <head> and ensure it appears within the first 1,024 bytes of the HTML document. This helps browsers identify the correct encoding before processing the rest of the page.
The older http-equiv format is still recognised, but it is unnecessarily long for modern HTML5 websites. Unless you are maintaining a legacy implementation, use the shorter <meta charset="utf-8"> declaration.
Character encoding is not a direct SEO ranking factor, but an incorrect or missing declaration can cause letters, symbols and other content to display incorrectly, affecting usability and how the page is interpreted.
Obsolete Meta Tags
There are several meta tags that are no longer used or are very rarely used, including:
- Meta Keywords: Several years ago, the best way to get your posts indexed for certain keywords was to use the meta keywords attribute. This method quickly became prone to spam, and Google decided to remove its influence altogether (Source: Google Search Central, 2009). Today, it is not used at all. If your site still has a meta keywords implementation, consider removing it as it is obsolete and may even harm your site’s ranking.
- Meta Revisit-After: This tag was intended to tell search engines when to revisit a page for fresh content. Modern search engines now use more sophisticated methods to determine when to crawl a site, rendering this tag obsolete.
- Meta Author: While this tag can still be useful for some purposes, search engines no longer use it to determine the author of a page’s content. Authorship is now handled through structured data and other means.
- Meta Subject: This tag was used to define the subject of a web page but is now largely ignored by search engines, which have more advanced methods to determine page content relevance.
- Meta Classification: Similar to the meta subject, this tag was used to classify a page’s content but is no longer relevant due to advancements in search engine algorithms.
- Meta Expiry/Expires: Intended to specify an expiration date for web content, this tag is rarely used today as dynamic content management systems and HTTP headers handle content updates and expiration more effectively.
- Meta Copyright: While it can be useful for legal purposes, this tag is not used by search engines to affect ranking or content evaluation.
- Meta Refresh: This tag can refresh or redirect a page after a specified time. However, it’s better practice to use server-side redirects (HTTP status codes) for these purposes due to better control and user experience.
Conclusion
Meta tags continue to play a crucial role in the proper functioning and SEO of your website. By understanding which tags are essential, how to use them effectively, and which ones to avoid, you can ensure your site remains optimized and competitive.
If you are unsure whether your metadata and indexing directives have been implemented correctly, a technical SEO audit can identify missing, duplicated or conflicting tags.
