I finally found the problem, posting it so that others with this may see.
As can be seen from other threads, there are two different meta_tags.php files.
The "larger" one is located under /includes/modules and the smaller one in which you define your site title, keywords, etc, is in /includes/languages/<your default language>/
If you are using overrides, you would then copy the smaller file to /includes/languages/<your default language>/<your custom template>/
If you are getting "META_TAG_TITLE" as your title in your browser bar, most likely you placed the smaller meta_tags.php file in an improper location.



