Meta Tag Generator

A page's head carries a small set of tags that decide two things: how the page is summarised in search results, and how its link unfurls when someone pastes it into a chat, a post or an email. Written by hand across a whole site they drift — one template forgets the canonical, another leaves the social image relative, a third never escapes an ampersand. Generating the set from a single form keeps every tag present and consistent.

The core three

These three are non-negotiable for any page you want indexed. Everything below is about what happens after the click, or after the share.

Open Graph is the social contract

The og: family began at Facebook and became the de facto standard read by LinkedIn, Slack, Discord, iMessage, WhatsApp, Teams and most link unfurlers. The properties that matter:

• og:title and og:description — the headline and blurb on the card, independent of the search snippet
• og:image — the picture, which does more for social click-through than any other single field
• og:url — the canonical address the card points back to
• og:type — what kind of thing the page is
• og:site_name — the publication or brand name shown above the title

If you add only one social set, add Open Graph. It has by far the widest reach.

og:type unlocks a vocabulary

Declaring the type is not decorative. It tells a scraper which additional properties to expect:

For most pages website is correct and sufficient. Use article on anything dated, because a published time feeds rich results and some platforms show the date on the card.

Twitter Cards, and why you still add them

X reads the twitter: family rather than og:. The key decision is the card value: summary renders a small square thumbnail, while summary_large_image renders the full-width 1.91:1 hero. If you have a 1200 × 630 image, choose the large card. Add the site handle for attribution. Everywhere else the og: tags already cover the preview, so twitter: is a few extra lines that guarantee X looks right.

The canonical quietly consolidates signals

When the same page is reachable at several URLs — with and without www, over http and https, with tracking or filter parameters, or across pagination — the canonical tells the search engine which one to treat as real and where to pool the link signals. Rules worth following:

1. Make it absolute, including protocol and host; a relative canonical is legal but ambiguous.
2. Default to self-referencing: every canonical page should point at itself.
3. Use one canonical per cluster of duplicates; never point several pages at one another in a loop.
4. Never canonical to a URL that is blocked, redirects, or is not the content you mean.

Escaping is where hand-written tags fail

An ampersand in a title, a quote in a description, an angle bracket in copy — each has to be escaped for the tag to parse. A raw ampersand can truncate a value early, and a stray quote can break the attribute and everything after it. Social scrapers are unforgiving: a malformed image property means no picture on the card, silently. Generating the markup escapes text and attribute contexts correctly every time, which is the least glamorous and most common reason a carefully written tag still renders wrong.

Social image specifications

• 1200 × 630 pixels — the 1.91:1 ratio used by the large card on every major platform
• Under roughly 8 MB, and at least 200 × 200 so the small card has something to crop
• An absolute URL, because scrapers fetch server-side and cannot resolve a relative path
• Text and logos kept in the centre, since platforms crop the edges at small preview sizes

A repeatable workflow

Fill the form once per page template rather than once per page. Decide the type for the template, choose or generate a 1200 × 630 image, paste the canonical, and emit the block. Check the desktop and mobile previews for truncation, then drop the markup into the head. Because every tag came from the same inputs, the search snippet and the social card can never disagree about the title, the description or the destination.