Robots Meta Tags

This tag is meant to help webmasters who cannot control the robots.txt file at their sites. It provides a final attempt to keep their certain pages out of search engines and other web utilities to protect sensitive content or "under construction" pages. (Note, as mentioned in a previous article, if you are using a robots.txt file, please ensure that it is not empty. Some bots interpret this NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW for the entire site!

• INDEX means that robots are able to include this page in search engines.
• FOLLOW means that robots are able to follow links (spidering).

A value of "NOINDEX" allows links from the page to be spidered, even though the page itself is not indexed. A value of "NOFOLLOW" allows the page to be indexed, but no links from the page are spidered. A value of "NONE" tells the robot to ignore the page.
(e.g.)
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="ALL,NONE,NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW">

default = "ALL"
"NONE" = "NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW"

Meta Description Tags

<META NAME="description" CONTENT="Description of your site">

The page description is usually produced along with the page title in the organic results pages (SERPs) of a search engine query. Some search engines use the first few lines of text on a page as a description if this tag is absent, so also ensure that paragraph one of your page is relevant.

As with the Keywords Meta Tag, be careful not to repeat terms too often to avoid rankings being penalized. This tag is not only used for search engine spiders, but also may be the text that appears as a result of an Internet user's search engine query. Here is the challenge - to create a description meta tag that not only is attractive to robots, but also to humans.

Keep your most important terms at the beginning of each description meta tag statement and try to have a different relevant statement for each page of your web site.

It is very important whenever you submit your sites in directory which will be given as the summary of your site in directory search results, similar to that of search engine results.

Meta Keywords tag

< meta name="keywords" content="metatags,keywords,description,definition" >

This should be a comma separated list of relevant words for the search engines to index your page. These words should reflect your site's most important theme. Be careful not to repeat the same keyword too often - 3 occurrences is a safe benchmark and this includes word variations. Some engines perceive heavy repetition to be "spamming the index" if used try to use it keywords with phrases without any grammatical errors in it.

Do not use words that are not relevant to your site. Many search engines will blacklist you if you do. Phrases such as "meta tag definition," are considered one keyword. When surfers enter queries into search engines, they will utilize phrases to help narrow down results. So think about the phrases that you would use if you were looking for subject material such as your site has to offer.

Keep your most important keywords and phrases within the first 100 characters of this statement.

Capitalization is not so much an issue as most Internet users tend to use lowercase text when submitting queries, but it may be a consideration when it comes to locality names. This is a difficult aspect to judge as some search engines do not distinguish between uppercase and lowercase and it is easy to go over the 3 word limit by using such variations.

Some search engine optimization professionals use commas between keywords and keyphrases, but others recommend against this practice as it takes up valuable space. As with a number of search engine optimization topics, this is hotly debated so you may wish to experiment.

Wherever possible, try and use a different keyword statement on each page. Due to black hat techniques the keyword tag was not included by Google it was still used by few search engines. Hence, try to utilize it to a great extent.

Search engine optimization and the meta keywords tag:

Long ago in Internet time, the meta keywords tag was very useful in helping pages to win on search engines. Unfortunately, so many unscrupulous webmasters (black hat seo's) have abused the meta keywords tag that search engines have had to de-emphasize their importance. Still, you should not leave the meta keywords tag off your pages.

Meta keywords tags should adhere to the following guidelines: (1) keep your list of keywords or keyword phrases down to 10 - 15 unique words or phrases; (2) separate the words or phrases using a comma (you do not need to leave a space between words separated by commas); (3) do not repeat words or phrases; (4) put your most important word or phrases at the beginning of your list.

Copyright issues of Meta tags

Remember that Meta tags, like all other material on the Internet is bound by copyright (whether a copyright notice is utilized or not).
Be careful not to copy and paste another persons tags, brand name, trademarks directly into your code without some heavy revising.
People have been prosecuted for doing so when found by the author and if he complaints via DMCA.
In case, if any of the licensed article, registered trademark, content, Images, brand name is used without getting any copyrights or permissions then the webmaster who used these unauthorized items may get punished by the Digital millennium copyright act, when a complaint is received to DMCA by the webmaster of the copyrighted item with enough proofs.

To know more details about the copyright and DMCA: Wikipedia DMCA

Importance of Meta tags

If you aren't utilizing Meta Tags in your web site's pages, you may be missing out on valuable traffic and therefore paying customers!

Meta tags are the sections of your HTML that provide direction and information for search engine robots. To get the best rankings possible in some search engines, be sure to use meta tags in every web page. Meta tags are not viewable to Internet users unless they examine the source code of your pages.

Unfortunately, many site owners abused Meta tags and search engines stopped using them as means of ranking sites for quite a while, but this situation has now changed. Of the tags mentioned below, the most important is the "description" tag.

The process of Meta tag development is half science and half magic, and this document is only a primer. Mathematical formulas are now in common use for developing keyword statements.

There are 4 types of meta-tags –

• Title - This is the text that appears in the title-bar of your web browser.
• Description - This is a quick summary of the information on the page.
• Keywords - These are words that are important in the page
• Robots - This helps in keeping certain files out of index.

In addition to these uses, we can use Meta tags to Redirect pages and to specify the version of html/xml used.