Meta tags tell search engines and social networks how to describe your page. Getting them right is worth doing and takes ten minutes. Understanding which of them actually do anything is worth more, because this tool generates one that has done nothing for over a decade.
The keywords tag is dead and has been since 2009
meta keywords does nothing. Google announced publicly in 2009 that it does not use the tag in web ranking, and nothing has changed since. Bing treats stuffing it as a spam signal. It is generated here because people expect to see it and because it is harmless — but harmless is the strongest thing that can be said for it.
It is not entirely without cost. The tag is visible in your page source to anyone who looks, which means you are publishing your target keyword list to your competitors for no benefit whatsoever. If you fill it in, you are doing unpaid competitive research for someone else.
The reason it died is instructive: it was a field where site owners declared what their page was about, which made it worthless the moment anyone had an incentive to lie. Every signal that a page controls about itself decays this way. That is why search engines moved to signals a page cannot self-declare, and why the tag has sat there inert for fifteen years while people kept filling it in.
Google will probably rewrite your title anyway
This surprises people who have spent an afternoon polishing titles. Google frequently replaces the title you wrote with something else — text drawn from your H1, from the link text pointing at you, or from the page content. Studies have consistently found it happening on the majority of results.
It happens when your title looks stuffed with keywords, when it is too long, when it is identical across many pages, or when Google simply judges something else on the page describes it better for that particular query. The title is a strong suggestion, not an instruction.
What follows is practical rather than defeatist. Write titles for humans and they get rewritten less, because the rewriting is triggered by the patterns that come from writing for a crawler. Keep them distinct across pages, put the specific thing first, and do not repeat your brand name in every one — Google will append it if it wants to.
The description does not rank you, and that is fine
meta description has not been a ranking factor for many years. Google will confirm this readily and it disappoints people every time. It still matters, just not for the reason they hoped: it is frequently the text under your link in the results, and that text decides whether anybody clicks.
So it is advertising copy, not SEO. Write it as the sentence that would persuade someone scanning ten results to choose yours. And expect it to be replaced too — Google swaps in a snippet from the page body whenever it thinks that answers the query better, which happens often for specific searches and rarely for brand ones.
The length advice everyone repeats — 155 characters — is a rule of thumb over a pixel measurement, and the truncation point varies by device. The reliable version of the advice: front-load it. Put the point in the first ninety characters and treat the rest as a bonus that may never be seen.
The social tags are the ones that actually work
og:title, og:description and og:image are honoured verbatim by every platform that matters. Unlike the search tags, nothing rewrites them. When someone pastes your link into Slack, WhatsApp, LinkedIn or a group chat, what appears is exactly what you specified.
Two things to get right. og:image must be an absolute URL — a relative path silently fails and you get a bare link with no picture, which is the difference between a post that gets clicked and one that does not. And the image should be around 1200×630; smaller and platforms render a small thumbnail instead of the large card.
The other thing worth knowing is that these are cached aggressively. Facebook and LinkedIn fetch your page once and hold the result, so fixing a broken og:image does not fix the preview that is already circulating. Both provide a debugger that forces a re-fetch, and you will need it, because you will get this wrong once.
Common questions
Is anything sent to a server?
No. This tool is marked "client": the tags are assembled in your browser tab from what you type. Nothing is transmitted.
Should I fill in the keywords field?
No. It does nothing for ranking anywhere, and it publishes your keyword strategy to anyone who views your source. The field exists here because its absence is more confusing than its presence, not because you should use it.
How long should my title be?
Around 60 characters is the usual advice, but the truncation is by pixel width rather than character count — Google cuts at roughly 580 pixels on desktop, so a title full of capitals or wide letters truncates sooner than one of the same length in narrow ones. The advice that survives all this: put the important words first. If the tail gets cut, it should not have been carrying the meaning.
Do I need both Open Graph and Twitter Card tags?
Mostly not. X falls back to Open Graph when Twitter tags are absent, so og:title and og:description cover both. The one worth adding separately is twitter:card set to summary_large_image, which is what makes the preview render as a big image rather than a small thumbnail — and Open Graph has no equivalent for that.
Why does my link preview show the wrong image?
Caching, almost certainly. The platform fetched your page once, kept what it found, and has not looked again. Facebook's Sharing Debugger and LinkedIn's Post Inspector both force a re-fetch. If the preview is right in the debugger but wrong in the wild, that is the cache and it will catch up. If it is wrong in the debugger too, check that og:image is an absolute URL.