Focus on the meta tags that actually move the needle: title tags, meta descriptions, viewport, charset, and canonicals. Title tags remain the strongest on-page SEO signal—keep them 50–60 characters, front-load your primary keyword, and make them compelling enough to earn clicks in SERPs. Meta descriptions don't directly influence rankings but drive click-through rate, which does. Write them at 150–160 characters, include a call to action, and treat them as ad copy for organic results. The viewport meta tag is non-negotiable for mobile usability: <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">. Charset should be UTF-8 to handle international characters properly. Canonical tags prevent duplicate content issues when you have multiple URLs serving similar content—critical for e-commerce sites with filters or session IDs, and for any Ottawa business running bilingual English-French pages. Skip meta keywords entirely. Google hasn't used them since 2009, and stuffing them signals amateur SEO. For social sharing, Open Graph tags (og:title, og:description, og:image) and Twitter Cards improve how links appear on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, but they're marketing tags, not ranking factors. If you're already using JSON-LD structured data for articles or products, don't duplicate that information in meta tags—it's redundant and bloats your HTML. Robots meta tags (noindex, nofollow) matter when you need surgical control over indexing—think staging environments, thank-you pages, or thin affiliate content. We use them liberally across the Ottawa SEO portfolio to keep low-value pages out of Google's index and preserve crawl budget for pages that actually convert. Most CMS platforms and SEO plugins handle the technical meta tags automatically. Your job is writing good titles and descriptions for every page that deserves to rank. If you're managing 500+ domains like we do, templatize where it makes sense but customize for your 20–30 highest-value pages. That's where manual effort pays off.