Meta tags are snippets of code in the HTML <head> that describe a page's content to search engines, browsers, and social platforms. They don't appear on the visible page itself, but they control how your page shows up in search results, social shares, and browser tabs. The two meta tags that matter most for SEO are the title tag and meta description. The title tag (technically <title>, not a meta tag but grouped with them) is your 50–60 character headline in search results and the browser tab. The meta description is the 150–160 character snippet underneath, which Google uses about 60–70% of the time if it's relevant to the query. Both directly affect whether someone clicks your result or your competitor's. Other meta tags include the robots tag (tells crawlers whether to index or follow links), canonical tag (prevents duplicate content issues), and Open Graph tags for social media. The viewport tag controls mobile display but has no SEO impact. The old keywords meta tag has been ignored by Google since 2009, yet you still see it on sites built by people copying 2008 advice. At Ottawa SEO, we see the same meta tag mistakes across most audits. Sites either stuff keywords into titles and descriptions like it's 2012, making them unreadable to humans, or they auto-generate generic descriptions that say nothing useful. A good meta description isn't just keyword placement, it's ad copy. You have 160 characters to convince someone your page answers their question better than the nine other results on their screen. The robots meta tag deserves special attention during site migrations or when managing staging environments. A single noindex tag left on a live page after launch has cost clients thousands in lost traffic. We've found noindex tags on entire category trees because a developer forgot to flip the setting in WordPress. Check your meta tags with View Source or a crawler like Screaming Frog, especially after any site changes. Google Search Console will flag indexing issues, but only after the damage shows up in rankings.