Whist creating your site, it is easy to neglect the importance of meta tags and their user and SEO effects, equally there are many rumours as to the use of these tags which simply are not true. I am going to outline the correct use of meta tags and how they can affect your SEO.

Description tag

<meta name=”description” content=”your site description” />

The description tag is a sales text, this is what the major search engines use as the snippet e.g.
<meta name=”description” content=”SEO Consult Are a Specialist SEO Team Devoted to Search Engine Optimisation Also Known as Search Engine Optimization And Website Optimisation Techniques”/>

A coherent and sales optimised snippet is incredibly important to draw people into your site from the search engines.

Sometimes the search engines will use the description snippet from a DMOZ (Open Directory Project) listing or a Yahoo Directory listing instead of the description tag on the site. To avoid a different or out of date DMOZ snippet from being used, you can add a couple of directives in your robots meta tag.

<meta name=”robots” content=”noodp, noydir”/>

The noodp directive means No Open Directory Project and the noydir means No Yahoo Directory. Just make sure you have a description tag to provide the necessary snippet, or a part of your content will just be selected.

Keywords tag

<meta name=”keywords” content=”some, site, keywords” />

The keywords tag is not officially supported by any of the major search engines, it can be useful to keep track of what keywords you want in a page but it has absolutely no SEO benefit for the major search engines.

Robots tag

<meta name=”robots” content=”some, robots, directives”/>

We have already touched on this tag, but now we will have a look at it in more detail. The robots tag as the name would suggest, gives directives to search engines on how they should index the website. It is worth mentioning that these directives will only apply to compliant robots, malicious robots will ignore this tag altogether.

There are two choices for page indexing: ‘index’ and ‘noindex’ and these do exactly what it says on the tin, they tell the search engine robot whether or not to index the current page.

The same applies for whether the robot should scan the page for links to follow: ‘follow’ and ‘nofollow’. This added to the two directives we spoke about earlier, gives us the below tag for a site. This will tell search engine robots to index the page, follow the links and not to use DMOZ or Yahoo Directory titles or snippets.

<meta name=”robots” content=”index, follow, noodp, noydir”/>
Individual robots

In addition to the robots meta tag, it is also possible to set your tags individually for specific search engine spiders:
Google:

<meta name=”googlebot” content=”index, follow, noodp, noydir”/>

Bing:

<meta name=”msnbot” content=”index, follow, noodp, noydir”/>

Yahoo:

<meta name=”slurp” content=”index, follow, noodp, noydir”/>

The use of these tags correctly can have a marked effect on your SEO and avoid potentially costly mistakes.

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