Meta Tags | Creating Meta Tags & Filling Meta Data, Search Optimised Meta Information

Meta tags are a group of tags that sit in the pages header. The meta tags, or meta data as they are known, are generic descriptors for the document. Meta tags can specify the documents keywords, description, theme, audience, formatting, author, and updated dates. Other information can also be integrated into the Meta group.

The most commonly used meta tags include "Meta Keywords" and "Meta Description". These tags are utilised so that the document has additional descriptors along with the title tag. The keywords meta tag is designed to assign keywords to the documents overview. This tag has been depreciated as search engine algorithms have evolved to detect the documents keywords by evaluating the pages backlinks and content.

The description meta tag is a brief overview of the pages content. This tag is commonly used within search engine listings as the documents descriptor. This tag should have information describing what the proceeding page is about.

Most designers and webmasters do not utilise any other meta tags as they offer no additional benefits to the webpage. Meta information was a part of the original HTML specification which was changed throughout the years of 1989, 1995, 1997, 1998, 2002, 2005, 2008, 2009. As the years have gone on, gradual depreciation has been seen across the generic meta spectrum.

The only meta tags that are of importance are,

Meta Keywords
Meta Description
Meta Content
Meta Robots

Screenshot of basic Meta Attributes:

Meta attributes offer additional instructions to search engines and crawlers alike. The meta keywords tag is ignored by larger search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Other search engines such as MSN, Live, Excite, ASK, Lycos and AOL still utilise this tag, although with a lower priority then historically.

Utilisation of the Meta Robots tag allows the specification on page crawling. You can use the Meta Robots tag to prevent the document being indexed by search engines and other search engine crawlers (Bots).

Robots Control
With the robots control functionality, tags can be implemented to prevent crawling of a document, below are common usage tags.

This version of the meta tag prevents Google and other search engines from Indexing or crawling the documents links. Applying both of these tags will prevent the page being indexed or acknowledged. This can be useful on pages that are either using duplicate content, or important login pages.

This version of the meta tag will prevent search engines from following the links on the page, but will allow search engines to index the page and its content. This is useful in situations for pages that should not inherit page rank. This is commonly found on pages that are not important towards rankings, such as privacy policy pages, summary pages, contact pages or other pages with a large volume of outbound links.

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, FOLLOW">
This version of the meta tag will prevent the search engines from indexing the page, but will allow the search engines to crawl links that are found on the page. This is useful and commonly implemented on search results pages which are dynamic, yet offer useful links to other parts of the website.

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX, FOLLOW">
This version of the meta tag will allow search engines to crawl and index the page whilst crawling links on the page. Typically search engines will do this without this tag being present.

You should always seek professional advice before implementing tags to prevent crawling and indexing issues.

Meta Refresh Tags for Re Directs
Meta refresh tags have become obsolete but are sometimes used in areas where dynamic redirects are not possible. Meta refresh tags allow the document to re-direct the end user to another page through HTML code. This tag has become obsolete as it is classed as an unfriendly search engine redirect. This tag should not be used on important pages, and should be avoided at all possible costs. Pages with these re-directs may not be indexed correctly, or may loose ground in search engine positions.