The Meta Title And Description Tags Checklist: What to Verify Before You Publish

Run through this before you consider meta title and description tags actually done:

1. Keep titles under ~60 characters and descriptions under ~155 — not a hard rule, but the point where Google starts truncating on most screen sizes.
2. Put the primary keyword near the front of the title; it's both a relevance signal and the part users scan first.
3. Write a unique meta description for every page — duplicate descriptions across a category of pages is one of the most common technical SEO issues on mid-size sites.
4. Treat the description as ad copy, not a summary — its only job is to earn the click, the ranking is already decided.
5. Double-check this after any site migration or major redesign, not just at launch.

None of these individually take long. The value is in doing all of them, every time, instead of remembering most of them most of the time.

Pair this with the backlink verification checklist if you're doing a fuller pre-launch pass.

Meta Tag Generator runs through most of this automatically.

Everything in this guide runs directly in your browser — no signup, no install.