What meta tags actually control
Meta tags don't appear on your page — they describe it to machines. The <title> and meta description shape your entry in search results; Open Graph tags control what Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack and WhatsApp display when someone shares your link; Twitter Card tags do the same for X.
The distinction that trips people up: meta tags don't directly improve your ranking. Google has said for years that the meta description is not a ranking factor. What it does affect is click-through rate — and a link that gets clicked more often, from a result that satisfies the searcher, absolutely does influence how you perform over time. Meta tags are a conversion problem dressed as an SEO problem.
Writing titles and descriptions that get clicked
Keep titles at roughly 50–60 characters. Google measures the rendered width in pixels rather than counting characters, so the limit is approximate, but 60 is a safe working ceiling. Lead with the distinctive words — if it truncates, you want the important part already read. Putting your brand name at the end, after a dash or pipe, is the conventional pattern for exactly this reason.
Descriptions have room for about 150–160 characters. Treat it as ad copy, not a summary: say what the visitor gets and why it's worth their click. Google frequently rewrites descriptions to match the specific query anyway, so a well-written one is a strong suggestion rather than a guarantee.
Open Graph: the tags that make links look good
Without Open Graph tags, a shared link is a bare URL with whatever text the platform can scrape. With them, it becomes a card with an image, headline and description — dramatically more clickable in a crowded feed.
The five that matter are og:title, og:description, og:image, og:url and og:type. The image does most of the work: use 1200 × 630 pixels (a 1.91:1 ratio) and keep essential text away from the edges, since platforms crop differently. Always use an absolute URL — relative paths silently fail, which is the single most common reason a share card shows no image.
Add og:site_name too. It's a small touch that puts your brand name on the card, and it costs one line.
Why your share preview looks wrong (and how to fix it)
Social platforms cache aggressively. If you share a link, then fix your tags, the old card will keep appearing — sometimes for weeks. The fix is to force a re-scrape: Facebook's Sharing Debugger and LinkedIn's Post Inspector both re-fetch on demand, and X refreshes its cache when you run a URL through its card validator.
The other frequent culprit is JavaScript. Meta tags injected client-side are often missed entirely, because most scrapers read the raw HTML without executing scripts. Meta tags belong in the server-rendered <head>, always.
