Joe Hayes {dot} Org

Simply put, a meta tag is information located between your head tags giving search engines more information about your web page. This isn’t viewable to a websurfer, however most web pages have at least some meta information and this can be seen by viewing a pages source code (right click, view source with internet explorer). When search engine bots (sometimes called spiders) come to your website, they use this meta information to help build their index of your web page. Typically, meta data looks like this:

Title Tag
The title tag is the most important tag of all. Not really a meta tag, but it goes hand in hand with them. The title tag is what appears at the top of your browser bar. This is also one of the key determining factors for search engines to determine the relevancy of your page in respect to the term being searched for. Make sure your title tag is unique for each page of your website, and accurately describes what you will find on your web page. Avoid “stop” words such as “the”, “and”, etc. as much as possible in the title. Less is more and keywords here are essential for good rankings.

Meta Description
The meta description tag, if the search engine supports it, allows you to influence the description shown under the search results. If a meta description is not used, often the search engine will just use the first text it finds in your source code (which might be your navigation links, not ideal). Even though not all search engines obey the meta description, it’s good practice to use it.

Meta Keywords
Meta keywords are outdated and not supported by most search engines. Years ago this was important, but because it was easy to manipulate rankings with this meta, it was devalued and in many cases not valued at all. Nevetheless, as long as it’s used responsibly it can only help. Choose keywords that you want your page found for, and be sure that these keywords can be found on that page.

Meta Robots
Meta robots tag controls the behavior of search engine spiders. The content=”all” is really unnecessary because they do this already, but I use it anyway for good practice. You may want to use keys such as “nofollow” or other tags to control their behavior. For example, the “nofollow” tag will instruct the bots to not follow any of the links on the entire page. The “follow”, in retrospect, will instruct them to follow all the links. “Index” would recommend the spiders to cache, or save, the web page into the search results, and “noindex” would instruct them not to. Some web designers only use the meta robots command if they want to prevent indexing or following the links on the page.

Other Meta Tags
There are many other meta tags available, but the above listed are the most common and most important. Some tags are supported by only certain search engines, and some aren’t supported at all. Nevertheless, while meta tags are not required it is still good coding practice to use them.