You need about 3–5 meta tags on every page to cover the fundamentals. Title tag and meta description drive click-through from search results. The viewport tag ensures mobile rendering works. Robots meta controls indexing (noindex, nofollow), and canonical tells Google which version of a URL is authoritative when you have duplicates. Those five handle 90% of SEO needs. Beyond that, another 5–10 tags cover specific scenarios. Open Graph (og:title, og:description, og:image) and Twitter Cards control how links display when shared on social platforms—important for traffic but not a ranking factor. The charset tag (UTF-8) avoids encoding issues. If you run hreflang for multilingual content, those tags live in the head too, though they're often better in XML sitemaps at scale. Refresh meta can redirect, but a 301 server redirect is cleaner. Author, copyright, and generator tags exist but carry zero SEO weight in 2025. At Ottawa SEO, we template the big five into every page by default, then layer in Open Graph for clients who share content frequently. We skip tags like keywords meta entirely—Google hasn't used it since 2009, and stuffing it just signals amateur hour. We also avoid refresh meta because it breaks the back button and doesn't pass link equity like a proper redirect. The trap is thinking more tags equal better SEO. They don't. A page with title, description, canonical, viewport, and robots set correctly will outrank a page with 30 tags where half are outdated or conflicting. Focus on the handful that actually influence crawling, indexing, and click behaviour. Audit your templates once a year to prune anything that isn't serving a documented purpose. If you're managing a large portfolio, script a crawler to flag missing essentials or tag conflicts—fixing those wins you more than any exotic meta tag ever will.