Meta Tag - Search Engine Optimization

A page's description meta tag gives Google and other search engines a summary of what the page is about

Whereas a page's title may be a few words or a phrase, a page's description meta tag might be a sentence or two or a short paragraph. Google Webmaster Tools provides a handy content analysis section that'll tell you about any description meta tags that are either too short, long, or duplicated too many times (the same information is also shown for <title> tags). Like the <title> tag, the description meta tag is placed within the <head> tag of your HTML document.

What are the merits of description meta tags?

Description meta tags are important because Google might use them as snippets for your pages. Note that we say "might" because Google may choose to use a relevant section of your page's visible text if it does a good job of matching up with a user's query. Alternatively, Google might use your site's description in the Open Directory Project if your site is listed there. Adding description meta tags to each of your pages is always a good practice in case Google cannot find a good selection of text to use in the snippet. The Webmaster Central Blog has an informative post on improving snippets with better description meta tags. Words in the snippet are bolded when they appear in the user's query. This gives the user clues about whether the content on the page matches with what he or she is looking for.

» Notice the image below is my Google meta description. The text highlighted in yellow is the meta description which is normally displayed on Google if your site is made correctly.
meta description screenshot

This tag provides a short description of the page. In some situations this description is used as a part of the snippet shown in the search results.

These meta tags can control the behavior of search engine crawling and indexing. The robots meta tag applies to all search engines. The default values are "index, follow" (the same as "all") and do not need to be specified. We understand the following values (when specifying multiple values, separate them with a comma):

noindex: prevents the page from being indexed
nofollow: prevents the Googlebot from following links from this page
nosnippet: prevents a snippet from being shown in the search results
noodp: prevents the alternative description from the ODP/DMOZ from being used
noarchive: prevents Google from showing the Cached link for a page.
unavailable_after:[date]: lets you specify the exact time and date you want to stop crawling and indexing of this page
noimageindex: lets you specify that you do not want your page to appear as the referring page for an image that appears in Google search results.

As a side-note, you can now also specify this information in the header of your pages using the "X-Robots-Tag" HTTP header directive. This is particularly useful if you wish to fine-tune crawling and indexing of non-HTML files like graphics or other kinds of documents.

Meta Keywords

Google does NOT use meta keywords anymore, they no longer serve any purpose on Google Search.

Tags: seo

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