What Are Open Graph Tags and Meta Tags?

Meta tags are snippets in a page's HTML head that describe the page to browsers, search engines, and social networks. The two most important for search are the title tag, which becomes the clickable headline in results, and the meta description, the summary text beneath it.

Keeping the title under about 60 characters and the description under about 155 stops search engines from cutting them off. They don't directly rank a page, but a clear, well-sized title and description improve how often people click your result.

Open Graph (its tags start with og:) is the standard that decides how your link looks when shared on Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, and most other platforms. It sets the preview card's title, description, and — crucially — the image, via og:title, og:description, and og:image.

Without Open Graph tags, a shared link often shows a bare URL or a random image scraped from the page. With them, you control exactly what people see, which makes links far more clickable.

X (Twitter) reads its own twitter: tags, though it falls back to Open Graph if they're missing. The twitter:card tag chooses the layout — a large image card or a compact summary — and the other tags mirror the Open Graph ones.

In practice you set all three sets together. The meta tag generator fills them in from a single form, shows a live preview of the share card, and warns when your title or description is too long — then you paste the output into your page's head.