Meta tags are absolutely still relevant, but their role has evolved. Title tags remain one of the strongest on-page ranking signals Google uses. Meta descriptions don't directly affect rankings, but a well-written description can improve CTR by 20-30% in competitive SERPs, which indirectly boosts rankings through user engagement signals. We test this constantly across our 500+ domain portfolio and see measurable traffic differences when we optimize these elements. The meta keywords tag died around 2009 and serves no purpose today. The robots meta tag controls indexing and crawling behavior, making it critical for managing duplicate content, staging environments, and pagination. Meta viewport controls mobile rendering. Open Graph and Twitter Card tags determine how your pages appear when shared socially, directly affecting social traffic quality. Structured data markup, technically implemented through JSON-LD rather than traditional meta tags, has become the highest-impact meta element. Schema markup for articles, products, FAQs, reviews, and local businesses generates rich snippets, knowledge panels, and featured results that can triple your SERP real estate. We've seen pages jump from position 6 to a featured snippet at position 0 purely through proper schema implementation. What changed is that Google now ignores low-effort meta tags. A meta description stuffed with keywords or a title tag that doesn't match page content gets rewritten by Google 60-70% of the time anyway. The algorithm pulls alternative text from your H1, first paragraph, or other on-page elements when your meta tags look manipulative or irrelevant. At Ottawa SEO, we write meta tags for humans first, search engines second. Title tags get the primary keyword within the first 50 characters, stay under 60 characters total, and include brand name when space permits. Meta descriptions answer the searcher's intent in 140-155 characters with a clear value proposition. We implement schema markup on every page type where applicable. The sites that skip meta tag optimization leave 15-25% of their potential organic traffic on the table.