Many historically-hyped meta tags (like meta keywords) have had no ranking effect for years; a smaller set still genuinely matters.
The ones that matter
- Title tag: still one of the strongest on-page ranking and click-through factors
- Meta description: doesn’t directly affect rankings, but strongly influences click-through rate from search results, which indirectly matters
- Robots meta tag: controls whether a page is indexed/followed at all — a misconfigured
noindexcan silently remove a page from search entirely - Viewport meta tag: required for mobile usability, which factors into mobile-first indexing
The ones that don’t
Meta keywords have been explicitly ignored by Google for well over a decade and can be omitted entirely.
FAQ
Should every page have a unique meta description?
Yes — duplicate meta descriptions across many pages waste the opportunity to influence click-through, and can look low-effort to both users and search engines alike.