Meta Tag Checker: our SEO audit checklist, turned into a free tool

How JWWD turned the meta tag checklist we kept rebuilding by hand into a free tool that tells you exactly what’s missing, too long or wrong.

The problem

We run a meta tag review on every site we build and every site we take over. Is the title the right length? Is there a canonical? Are the Open Graph tags complete? Does every image have alt text?

We kept rebuilding that checklist by hand. The SEO tools we tried were locked behind signups, full of upsells, or gave vague advice like “improve your meta description” without saying what was wrong with it.

What we built

Meta Tag Checker fetches a live page, parses it properly and reports on what search engines and social platforms will see:

  • Title and description: lengths checked against a 30 to 60 character band for titles and 120 to 160 for descriptions.
  • Social previews: Open Graph and Twitter Card tags, so shared links look right.
  • Technical tags: canonical URL, viewport, page language and character set.
  • Structure and accessibility: the heading hierarchy, the H1, and images missing alt text.

Each page gets a grade and a list of specific issues, with the actual character counts.

How it's built

  • A real DOM parser: Pages are parsed with PHP’s DOMDocument, not guessed at with regular expressions, with encoding handling so non-English pages read correctly.
  • Bounded fetching: The tool reads at most the first 2 MB of HTML, enough for the head and body without downloading huge pages.
  • Public standards, not invented rules: Checks follow Google’s published length guidance, the Open Graph protocol, the W3C HTML spec and WCAG for alt text.
  • Safe by default: Every URL is resolved first and private, internal or loopback addresses are refused. The verified IPs are pinned for the request, which blocks DNS rebinding between the check and the fetch.
  • Nothing kept: Checks run in real time and are discarded. Submitted URLs and reports aren’t stored.

Held to its own standard

Meta Tag Checker also publishes an Australian Meta Tag Report, built by running the same engine over the homepage of every .au domain in the Tranco top million list.

The report figures and its chart images are both generated from one data file, so the artwork can never quote numbers the page no longer does. And the report page has to pass the checker itself: every edit is run back through the tool, because a flagship page that grades poorly against its own rules isn’t worth publishing.

A separate length checker lets you test a title or description before it goes live.

The result

A free, no-signup tool that came straight out of our own audit work, with no hidden tiers and no watermarks on the results. It’s how we’d want an SEO tool to behave: specific, transparent about what it checks, and kept current as search engines change their guidance. See the Meta Tag Checker tool page for a quick overview.

Have a project like this in mind? Talk to JWWD.