The meta tags every page needs
Search engines and social networks read a handful of tags in the page head to decide how to show your page. A clear title and description decide whether people click, a canonical tag prevents duplicate-content problems, robots directives control indexing, and Open Graph tags control the card that appears when your link is shared on Facebook, LinkedIn, WhatsApp or X.
Writing a good title and description
- Keep titles to about 30 to 60 characters (and under roughly 580 pixels) so they are not cut off.
- Put the main topic first and your brand last.
- Write the description as a promise of what the reader will learn, at 70 to 160 characters.
- Make each page unique. Google may rewrite them, but good ones still win clicks.
Why add structured data?
JSON-LD schema describes your page in a machine-readable way. It can make pages eligible for rich results such as FAQs, product details and breadcrumbs where Google supports them. Only mark up what visitors can actually see on the page. Validate the output with Google's Rich Results Test.
See the full technical SEO checklist for everything else that affects crawling and ranking.