What Are Meta Tags?
Meta tags are HTML elements that provide search engines and social media platforms with information about your web page. While they are invisible to visitors, they directly influence how your page appears in search results and when shared on social media.
Title Tag Best Practices
Keep your title under 60 characters to prevent truncation in Google results. Include your primary keyword near the beginning. Make it compelling — your title is the first thing searchers see and directly impacts your click-through rate.
Meta Description Tips
Aim for 150-160 characters. Include a clear value proposition and a call to action. While meta descriptions do not directly affect rankings, they significantly influence whether users click on your result versus a competitor’s.
Open Graph Tags
Open Graph (OG) tags control how your page appears when shared on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other platforms. The most important OG tags are og:title, og:description, og:image, and og:url. Always include an og:image — posts with images get significantly more engagement.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the ideal length for a meta title?
Google typically displays the first 50 to 60 characters of a title tag in search results. Titles longer than 60 characters are often truncated with an ellipsis, which can cut off important keywords or your brand name. Aim for titles between 50 and 60 characters that include your primary keyword near the beginning. Our SERP preview shows you exactly how your title will appear in Google before you publish.
How long should a meta description be?
Meta descriptions should be between 120 and 160 characters. Google may display up to 160 characters on desktop and slightly fewer on mobile. Descriptions shorter than 120 characters may not provide enough context for searchers. Write descriptions that clearly summarize the page content and include a compelling reason to click. Google sometimes rewrites meta descriptions if it determines the page content provides a better snippet, but a well-written description is usually used as-is.
Do meta descriptions affect search rankings?
Meta descriptions are not a direct ranking factor in Google’s algorithm. However, they significantly impact click-through rates, which can indirectly affect rankings over time. A compelling meta description that accurately matches search intent will attract more clicks than a generic or missing one. Google may bold keywords in your description that match the searcher’s query, making well-optimized descriptions more visually prominent in results.
What are Open Graph tags and why do they matter?
Open Graph tags control how your pages appear when shared on social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Without them, social platforms will attempt to pull a title, description, and image automatically, often with poor results. OG tags let you specify exactly what title, description, and image appear in social shares. This is especially important for content marketing, as a well-formatted social preview significantly increases engagement and click-through rates from shared links.
Meta tags are just one piece of technical SEO. Getting them right matters, but so does your site architecture, internal linking strategy, and structured data. If you want a professional audit of your full SEO setup, Toimi’s SEO team can help identify what is holding your rankings back.