HTML Meta Tags Cheat Sheet: Syntax and What Each Tag Does
Compact table of HTML meta tags, Open Graph and X card tags: what each tag does, what Google supports or ignores, and links to full guides.
This page lists the common tags in the HTML <head> with what each one does and what search engines document about it. Each row links to the full guide on this site. Add the tags that have a documented effect, and skip the others.
A basic page head
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
<title>Page title</title>
<meta name="description" content="One or two sentences about this page.">
<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/page/">
<meta property="og:title" content="Page title">
<meta property="og:type" content="article">
<meta property="og:url" content="https://example.com/page/">
<meta property="og:image" content="https://example.com/images/page.png">
<meta property="og:description" content="One or two sentences about this page.">
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">
</head>Tags for browsers and search engines
| Tag | What it does | Guide |
|---|---|---|
<meta charset="utf-8"> |
Declares the character encoding. The HTML standard allows only utf-8 and requires the tag in the first 1024 bytes |
meta charset |
<meta name="viewport"> |
Sets the layout width and zoom on mobile browsers. Google reads it as a sign that the page is mobile friendly | meta viewport |
<title> |
The title of the page. It is an element, not a meta tag. Google uses it as one source for title links | None |
<meta name="description"> |
A short description of the page. Google sometimes uses it for the snippet | meta description |
<meta name="robots"> |
Rules for indexing and snippets, such as noindex and nosnippet |
robots meta tag |
<link rel="canonical"> |
Names the preferred URL when several URLs show the same content (RFC 6596) | canonical tag |
<meta name="author"> |
The name of one of the authors of the page | author and generator |
<meta name="generator"> |
The software that made the page | author and generator |
<meta name="keywords"> |
A list of keywords. Google Search does not use it | meta keywords |
Tags for link previews
| Tag | What it does | Guide |
|---|---|---|
og:title, og:type, og:url |
The required Open Graph tags for the title, type and canonical URL | Open Graph meta tags |
og:image |
The image for link previews. Google can also use it to choose a preview image | og:image |
og:description |
A description of one or two sentences | Open Graph meta tags |
twitter:card |
The card type on X, such as summary_large_image |
Twitter card meta tags |
Open Graph tags use the property attribute. Other meta tags use the name attribute.
Other tags that Google supports
Google’s meta tags page also lists these tags:
| Tag | What Google does |
|---|---|
<meta name="google-site-verification" content="..."> |
Verifies that you own the site in Search Console |
<meta name="googlebot" content="notranslate"> |
Does not offer a translation of the page |
<meta name="google" content="nopagereadaloud"> |
Stops Google text-to-speech services from reading the page aloud |
<meta name="rating" content="adult"> |
Marks the page as adult content for SafeSearch |
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="..."> |
Redirects after a delay. Google recommends a server-side 301 redirect instead |
Google ignores meta tags that it does not support. Google says that letter case is generally not important in meta tags, except in google-site-verification. Google also recommends that you do not add or change meta tags with JavaScript when you can avoid it.
Tags that Google ignores
Google lists these as unsupported: the keywords meta tag, the lang attribute, <link rel="next"> and <link rel="prev">, and nositelinkssearchbox. In the robots meta tag, Google also ignores noarchive and nocache.
What meta tags do not do
Meta tags do not control crawling. A crawler must fetch the page to read them, and robots.txt controls which pages it fetches.
Google and Bing document an effect of some robots rules on their AI features. Google says that nosnippet and max-snippet apply to AI Overviews and AI Mode. Bing says that noarchive and nocache control the use of a page in Bing Chat. The robots meta tag guide gives the details.
If you want to keep content out of Gemini training or OpenAI model training, use the robots.txt tokens Google-Extended and GPTBot. These are not meta tags.