Metadata

Page metadata tells crawlers and social platforms what a URL represents: `<title>`, meta description, canonical hint, robots directives, Open Graph, and Twitter cards. In Next.js and similar frameworks, metadata is often per-route and must match rendered content.

					<title>Checkout — Acme Shop</title>
<meta name="description" content="Secure checkout for Acme Shop orders." />
<meta property="og:title" content="Checkout — Acme Shop" />
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />
				

| Tag | Purpose | |-----|---------| | `<title>` | Primary SERP headline; unique per URL | | description | Snippet hint—not a ranking guarantee | | og:* / twitter:* | Social preview cards | | robots | index/noindex, follow/nofollow per page |

Titles and descriptions should be unique, accurate, and aligned with visible H1 and body—not keyword stuffing.

On interviews: App Router `generateMetadata`; staging noindex; difference between robots meta and robots.txt; dynamic OG images.

Common pitfalls: duplicate titles across routes; empty descriptions on money pages; og:image wrong aspect ratio; client-only title updates invisible to some crawlers.

The trade-off is marketing copy flexibility versus crawl budget and snippet quality.

Checklist:

• Unique title per indexable URL.
• Description matches page intent.
• OG/Twitter tags for shareable pages.
• noindex on staging and internal tools.