Meta tags are important, but not all of them matter equally. Title tags and meta descriptions are the two you should obsess over. Title tags remain a confirmed ranking factor and the most prominent element in search results. Meta descriptions don't directly influence rankings, but a well-written one can boost CTR by 20-40%, which sends behavioral signals that do affect rankings. We test titles and descriptions constantly across our 500+ domain portfolio and see measurable traffic differences from small wording changes. The meta keywords tag died around 2009 when Google officially stopped using it. Anyone still populating it is wasting time. The robots meta tag matters for controlling indexing and crawling on specific pages—use it when you need noindex, nofollow, or want to block snippet generation. The viewport meta tag is essential for mobile usability but has nothing to do with rankings directly. Open Graph and Twitter Card tags aren't traditional SEO signals, but they control how your pages appear when shared on social platforms. A compelling OG image and description can drive referral traffic, which indirectly helps SEO. We include them on all client sites because the implementation cost is near zero. Canonical tags, while technically link elements rather than meta tags, prevent duplicate content issues and are absolutely critical for e-commerce sites or any domain with URL parameters. We've salvaged sites losing 30-50% of their ranking potential simply by implementing proper canonicals. At Ottawa SEO, we audit meta tag implementation in every technical SEO review. Most sites we inherit have decent title tags but completely generic meta descriptions copied from templates or auto-generated. That's leaving money on the table. The real skill is writing titles that balance keyword placement with click appeal, staying under 60 characters so they don't truncate in results. For descriptions, you have about 155 characters to make someone choose your result over nine others—that's a copywriting challenge, not just an SEO checkbox.