Types of Meta tags
META tags exist within HTML coding and are used to enable a search engine to crawl a website and then index it within the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP’s). In this part of the ‘How to SEO’ manual, we will look at the four most common META tags.
Title tag
The title META tag is like the heading of a document or the title of a book. It gives the search engine a description of what a webpage is all about. It allows a search engine spider to quickly and efficiently crawl the page and index it accordingly.
Keywords
The keyword META tag has been vastly changed and scrupulously checked in order to stop keyword spamming. Many people feel that keyword META tags are irrelevant to a search engine, yet they tell a search engine what keywords to look for within a text.
Description
The description META tag gives the search engine a much more comprehensive and detailed account of what the web page is all about. It allows the web page author to create a more definitive description to be shown on the SERPs rather than the search engine creating a description based solely on the content on the page.
Robot tags
The Robot META tag determines whether a search engine can index a web page. The 'noindex' value stops a search engine from indexing a web page and the 'nofollow' value stops any links from being crawled. The robots format is supported by several search engines and the META tag is the most efficient way to stop search engines from indexing any content within a web page.
META tags may seem to be imposing and confusing but they are really very simply commands written in HTML that tell a web page what to do. They stop search engines from seeing some content and allow you to control what they do see and what they include in the SERP’s.
Related posts:
