Meta Tags

Meta tags are short notes in the code at the top of a web page, written for machines rather than readers. Each is a small labelled statement: this is the page's title, this is a one-line description of it, this is how crawlers should treat it. None of them appear in the page itself. All of them shape how the page is understood elsewhere.

Two matter more than the rest. The title tag is the page's actual name — what shows in a browser tab, what a search result usually displays as its headline, and one of the first things any machine reads to work out what a page is. The meta description is a short summary of the page; it is not a ranking factor, but it is often the sentence a person reads when deciding whether to click, which makes it worth writing rather than leaving to a generator.

Open Graph tags are a family of meta tags with one specific job: telling messaging apps and social platforms what to put on the preview card when your link is shared. They are the reason a pasted link unfolds into an image, a headline and a line of text rather than arriving as a bare grey address.

The characteristic failure is silence. Meta tags fail without complaining. A title left as Home | My Site from the day the template was installed. A description describing a page you rewrote a year ago. Or, worst and rarest, a stray instruction telling search engines not to index the page at all. Nothing turns red, your site looks perfect to you, and the problem exists only in places you never look.

The human translation is the writing on the outside of a parcel. The contents are the contents either way, but everything that happens to it in transit — how it is sorted, where it is sent, whether anyone bothers to open it — is decided by the label.