Meta tags should not be closed in HTML5. The correct syntax is <meta name="description" content="Your description here"> with no trailing slash. HTML5 dropped the self-closing requirement that XHTML enforced, so <meta ... /> is now redundant legacy syntax that parsers simply ignore. Google, Bing, and every modern browser treat both identically, meaning the slash has zero impact on crawling, indexing, or rankings. The confusion stems from XHTML days (mid-2000s) when void elements—tags with no closing pair like <meta>, <link>, <img>—had to be self-closed with a slash to validate. XHTML is effectively dead outside niche enterprise systems. HTML5, the living standard since 2014, made that slash optional for void elements. W3C validator accepts both forms, but the no-slash version is canonical HTML5. At Ottawa SEO Inc., we strip trailing slashes from meta tags in client audits because cleaner code is easier to maintain and signals you're writing modern HTML. Some developers still add them out of habit or because their CMS templating system defaults to XHTML syntax. It won't hurt you, but it won't help either—it's purely cosmetic once the page hits a browser or bot. What actually matters for meta tags: correct attributes (name/property, content), proper character encoding (UTF-8 declared early in <head>), and logical order (charset first, then viewport, then SEO tags). A missing closing angle bracket or mismatched quotes will break parsing; a trailing slash will not. Focus your QA energy on whether your meta descriptions are unique per page, under 155 characters, and aligned with search intent—not on whether you typed a slash. If you inherit a site mixing both syntaxes, pick one style and enforce it in your templating layer or build process for consistency, but don't waste developer hours refactoring thousands of tags just to remove slashes.