Only a handful of meta tags actually move the SEO needle. The title tag is your heaviest hitter—it directly influences rankings and click-through rates, so keep it under 60 characters with your primary keyword front-loaded. The meta description doesn't affect rankings but controls your snippet in search results; write compelling copy in 150–160 characters that earns clicks. The viewport meta tag is non-negotiable for mobile usability, which Google uses for all indexing. Beyond those, robots meta tags (noindex, nofollow, noarchive) control how search engines interact with your page. Canonical tags prevent duplicate content issues when you have similar pages or URL parameters. Open Graph and Twitter Card tags don't help rankings but determine how your content displays when shared on social platforms—worth implementing if social drives meaningful traffic. Meta keywords died around 2009. Google confirmed they ignore it entirely, and no major search engine uses it for ranking. Geo meta tags, author tags, and most schema-like meta tags either provide zero benefit or have been replaced by JSON-LD structured data. The refresh meta tag can trigger soft penalties if used for redirects instead of proper 301s. At Ottawa SEO, we strip out legacy meta clutter during audits. Clients often have 8–12 meta tags per page from old CMS templates or misguided 2010-era advice. We keep title, description, viewport, canonical, robots when needed, and OG tags for properties with active social strategies. Everything else gets deleted unless there's a documented edge-case reason. That cuts page weight slightly and keeps the head section clean for actual ranking factors like Core Web Vitals scripts. One thing to watch: some platforms auto-generate terrible meta descriptions by pulling the first 160 characters of body text. Override those manually for key pages. A good description can lift CTR by 15–30% even without changing rankings, which indirectly signals quality to Google over time. Focus your meta tag energy on title and description quality, not quantity of tags.