SEO Meta Tags: What to Check and What to Ignore

Separate presentation from indexing controls

I often find metadata work reduced to filling every field in an SEO plugin. The useful question is not whether a field is filled. It is whether the published page sends the right instruction and tells the right story. A well-written description cannot compensate for an important page accidentally marked noindex.

I review a representative service page, article, product, category and any filtered page before making site-wide changes. Templates may have different defaults. A setting inherited from staging can affect a whole section while individual editors see nothing obviously wrong.

Write a description that helps someone choose

My starting point is the page’s audience, useful detail and next step. For a merchant-feed service, a draft might be: “Resolve product-feed errors, review Merchant Center settings and prioritise improvements to your Shopping listings. Work directly with Himanshu.” That summary is only suitable where the page offers those activities.

For an article, describe the problem the reader can solve instead of copying the service pitch. For a product, mention verified differentiators such as material or compatibility when they matter to the purchase. Avoid inserting every nearby town or repeating the keyword in different forms.

Google can choose page text instead of the supplied description. Its snippet documentation explains how summaries are selected. I do not treat a different snippet as a reason to keep rewriting an otherwise accurate description.

Check the controls before improving the wording

Look at the delivered HTML and response headers, not just the editor. An HTTP-level instruction can exist alongside a plugin setting. Investigate conflicts and establish which system owns each rule before removing anything.

For an important public article, confirm that no unintended noindex directive is present. For private customer documents, use proper access control rather than relying on search settings. A robots.txt block is not a substitute for protecting information. My PDF SEO checklist covers public downloads and document-specific controls.

A canonical is a link element, not a meta description. Point it to the intended equivalent URL, not automatically to the homepage or the first category. The Search Console diagnosis guide covers checking an affected URL before applying a template-wide fix.

Give shared links their own quality check

I check the Open Graph title, description, URL and image as a complete preview. Use an image that remains understandable when cropped, with important information away from the edges. It must be publicly retrievable and should not point at a staging domain.

Do the same for Twitter card settings. Do not assume that changing the featured image updates every plugin override. Social platforms can cache earlier previews, so inspect the stored settings and the delivered markup before concluding that the new image is broken.

For my guides, a relevant diagram or original screenshot should help identify the subject. A generic logo repeated on every article tells a potential reader much less. Keep image files compressed and include the correct dimensions in the media metadata.

Skip obsolete fields and unreviewed automation

Google explicitly lists meta keywords as unsupported in its meta-tag documentation. I do not sell filling that field as an optimisation deliverable. Density targets for descriptions are not a useful writing brief either.

AI can help draft summaries from approved content, but I check for invented prices, guarantees and services before publishing. An AI-specific phrase in a meta description is not a route to AI citations. The visible page still needs to answer the question clearly.

My final handover is a small change log: affected template, old setting, approved replacement, verification and owner. Pair this with the title-tag guide. For a wider review, direct consulting helps decide which issues need development support and which the content team can handle.

Common questions