Meta Tag Generator

What are meta tags?

Meta tags are elements in the <head> of an HTML page that describe the page to browsers, search engines and social networks. Some are essential for every page — the character set, the responsive viewport, the <title> and the meta description. Others give search engines instructions: the robots meta tag controls indexing and snippets, the canonical link names the preferred URL, and hreflang links connect language versions of the same page.

This generator builds a clean, standards-compliant snippet from a single form. Every value is HTML-escaped, URLs are validated as absolute links, hreflang codes are checked for common mistakes such as en-UK or jp, and verification fields accept either the bare code or the whole tag you copied from Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools.

Defaults follow current practice: tags that do nothing are left out. index, follow is the default behaviour, so no robots tag is added unless you set a directive, and the meta keywords tag is off because Google has ignored it for well over a decade. If your site runs on WordPress, the WordPress Meta Tag Generator outputs the same tags as theme code.

How to use the Meta Tag Generator

1. Enter the title, meta description and canonical URL. The bars show whether each will fit in Google’s results.
2. Set indexing rules: index/noindex, follow/nofollow and snippet controls such as max-image-preview:large.
3. Add hreflang rows for each language version — including this page itself — and an optional x-default.
4. Optionally add theme-color, color-scheme, a referrer policy, verification codes and Open Graph/X basics.
5. Copy or download the snippet and paste it inside <head>, replacing any duplicates your CMS or theme already outputs.

Example

A product page with a canonical, robots directives and two regional versions:

<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
<title>Cold Brew Coffee Maker – 1.5 L Stainless Steel | BrewLab</title>
<meta name="description" content="Make smooth, low-acid cold brew at home. Our 1.5 L stainless steel cold brew coffee maker fits in a fridge door and is dishwasher-safe. Shop now.">
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow, max-image-preview:large">
<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.example.com/products/cold-brew-coffee-maker/">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-US" href="https://www.example.com/products/cold-brew-coffee-maker/">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-GB" href="https://www.example.co.uk/products/cold-brew-coffee-maker/">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://www.example.com/products/cold-brew-coffee-maker/">

Robots directives explained

• noindex keeps the page out of search results. Google must be able to crawl the page to see it, so don’t also block it in robots.txt — see the robots.txt guide.
• nofollow asks crawlers not to follow any link on the page. Use rel="nofollow" on individual links instead when only some links are untrusted.
• nosnippet removes the text snippet; max-snippet:[n] caps its length; max-image-preview:large allows big image previews in results and Discover.
• max-video-preview:[n] limits video previews to n seconds (-1 means no limit).
• noarchive is no longer used by Google since cached pages were removed, but Bing and others still respect it.

Common meta tag mistakes

• Multiple title tags or descriptions on one page, usually from a theme and an SEO plugin both printing them.
• Relative canonical URLs or canonicals that point to redirected, noindexed or 404 pages.
• hreflang sets without return links: every version must list all the others and itself.
• Leaving noindex on after launching a staging site.