Tags for this article: HTML Basics, importance of meta tags, META Robots Tag, META Tags, using meta tags
META tags are a very important element of HTML because these can help direct large amount traffic towards your website or you can also hide a certain page from being a search engine. These META tags should be decided intelligently so that your website can be easily searched within a search engine. We can say that META tags are basically used to specify keywords, description and a page’s title. These are of various types and each type has a very important role to play.
The META Description Tag
This is one of the most important META tag and is put for influencing the readers. It generally consists of 200 to 250 characters but only a small part is displayed on the screen. When you search for something on a search engine the first thing you get is a title but this title is provided with certain information and this small description is known as the description META Tag. You are only able to read a small portion of the article and for reading the entire article you will have to click on the title and open that particular webpage. The biggest benefit of creating a META Description Tag is that it provides some control on a number of crawlers. The simplest form of doing it is taking the first sentence of your body copy and using it as a META Description Tag.
The META Keywords Tag
Another very important META Tag is the META Keywords Tag. The META Keywords Tag provides extra text for a number of crawler based search engines. These Tags are normally ignored by most of the crawlers but it can still provide you that slight edge over others. The META Keywords Tag should be decided intelligently in order to get positive results. This can be explained by an example lets suppose you had some page that was all about “car rental” and you have mentioned the same word a few times in the actual page then you should take “car rental” as the META Keywords Tag. If you follow the above mentioned step then the META Keywords Tag will definitely boost the page. On the other hand if your page does not have the words “car rental” then keeping it as a META Keywords Tag is of no use. Hence we can say that this META Tag works in conjunction with the text that you have in the body copy. But there is no guarantee that all crawlers will support it but may be a few will which will help improve the ranking of that very page.
The META Robots Tag
The META Robots Tag is very important as well. This Tag helps you to specify that some particular page should not be indexed by any search engine. You can easily keep out the spiders by adding the text in between the head tags of the page which you don’t want to get indexed. The important thing is that this META Tag is supported by all crawlers and by using it you can easily block any page that you want.