Meta tags are HTML elements that live in your page's <head> section and communicate information about your page to search engines and browsers. They're absolutely part of SEO, but not all meta tags carry equal weight. The title tag (technically a tag, not a meta tag, but grouped in practice) remains one of the strongest on-page signals. Google uses it directly for rankings and displays it in search results. The meta description doesn't influence rankings but affects whether users click your result, which indirectly impacts performance through CTR signals. We write titles at 50–60 characters and descriptions at 140–155 characters to avoid truncation in SERPs. Most other meta tags matter very little. Meta keywords died around 2009 when Google officially stopped using them due to spam. The robots meta tag (noindex, nofollow) controls crawling and indexing, so it's critical for technical SEO but not a ranking factor. Open Graph and Twitter Card tags don't affect Google rankings but control how your content appears when shared on social platforms, which can drive traffic. The viewport meta tag is essential for mobile usability, which is a ranking factor since mobile-first indexing became standard. Charset declaration prevents encoding issues but isn't a ranking signal. At Ottawa SEO Inc., we focus meta tag optimization on three areas: crafting titles that balance keywords with click appeal, writing descriptions that improve CTR for target queries, and ensuring technical meta tags like canonical and robots are correctly implemented. We see clients obsess over meta keywords or obscure tags while ignoring title tag optimization, which is backwards. The ROI hierarchy is clear: title tags and meta descriptions deserve real effort because they appear in search results. Structured data markup (not technically meta tags but often confused with them) increasingly matters for featured snippets and rich results. Everything else is either technical hygiene or irrelevant. If you're spending more than 3 minutes per page on meta tags beyond title and description, you're probably overthinking it.