The fastest way to understand how a competitor’s page is set up for search and social is to read its meta tags. Title, description, canonical, robots directives, Open Graph, Twitter Card, viewport, structured data hints: all of it is in the <head>, all of it is public, and reading it takes thirty seconds once you know what you are looking at. This guide explains every tag you’ll find, what a good value looks like, and how to use the Meta Tag Extractor to pull them from any URL without opening the source.
The tags and what they tell you
| Tag | Purpose | What to look for |
|---|---|---|
<title> | Search result headline, browser tab | Under 60 chars, keyword first, unique per page |
meta name="description" | Search result snippet | Under 155 chars, a real sentence, keyword once |
link rel="canonical" | Which URL is the “real” one | Points to itself (self-canonical) on most pages; elsewhere on duplicates |
meta name="robots" | Index/follow instructions | index, follow or absent. noindex on a page you expect to rank is a bug |
meta name="viewport" | Mobile rendering | width=device-width, initial-scale=1. Missing means not mobile-friendly |
og:* | Social previews (Facebook, LinkedIn, WhatsApp) | Title, description, image (1200×630), url, type |
twitter:* | X card | twitter:card = summary_large_image |
meta charset | Text encoding | UTF-8 |
link rel="alternate" hreflang | Language/region versions | Present on multilingual sites; each version should list all others |
meta name="generator" | CMS/plugin fingerprint | Tells you they run WordPress 6.x, Elementor, etc. Many sites remove it |
script type="application/ld+json" | Structured data | Article, FAQPage, Product, Organization. Shows what rich results they target |
Reading a competitor in five minutes
- Paste their top-ranking URL into the extractor. Note the title structure: do they lead with the keyword, use a year, use brackets, append the brand?
- Read the description. It tells you what angle they chose and often reveals the sub-topics they cover.
- Check the canonical. If it points to a different URL, the page you found is a variant; audit the canonical target instead.
- Look at the structured data types. FAQPage means they have an FAQ section that may be earning rich results; HowTo means step content. Those are the sections to match or beat.
- Look at OG image and description. This is how the page looks when shared, and what they think is the hook.
- Repeat for their top three pages and yours. Patterns show up quickly: consistent title formulas, consistent description length, consistent schema usage.
Auditing your own site
The same extraction on your own pages catches the mistakes that don’t show in the CMS editor:
- Theme-generated duplicates. Some themes output their own OG tags alongside the SEO plugin’s, so there are two
og:titletags and platforms pick the wrong one. - Canonical pointing at staging or http://. Common after migrations. A canonical to another domain hands your ranking to it.
- Stray noindex. Left over from development, or set by a plugin on a template type. Pages with noindex will never rank, however good they are.
- Empty descriptions on pages you thought were done.
- Missing viewport on custom landing pages built outside the theme.
Combine with the HTTP Header Checker, because two instructions live in headers rather than meta tags: X-Robots-Tag (a noindex here overrides a page that looks fine) and Link: rel="canonical". A page can look perfect in the extractor and still be blocked by a header.
What isn’t worth reading
meta name="keywords"— ignored by every search engine since 2009. If a competitor fills it, it tells you their SEO advice is old.meta name="author",copyright,revisit-after— no effect on anything.meta http-equiv="refresh"— a redirect done badly; if you see it on your site, replace with a 301.
Fixing what you find
Write the corrected title and description and check them in the SERP Snippet Preview; generate missing social tags with the Open Graph Tag Generator. In WordPress with Yoast or Rank Math, all of these are per-page fields; on static sites they live in the template’s head.
Frequently asked questions
Can I see a competitor’s meta tags without any tool?
Yes: right-click → View Page Source and search for <meta. The extractor just lists them in a readable table and flags length and missing items.
Which meta tags matter most for SEO?
Title, description, canonical, robots and viewport. The rest are for social sharing, encoding or rich results.
Why does the extractor show two og:title tags?
Two plugins or a theme and a plugin are both outputting them. Disable one; platforms will otherwise pick unpredictably.
Does the meta keywords tag do anything?
No. Google, Bing and Yandex stopped using it years ago. Leave it out.
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