META tags are lines of code placed in the tag of HTML page. They are used to give instructions to the search engine spiders about the type of web page it is. When a search engine finds your page, it will need to index it ( to add to its database ) with some information off the page. Many search engines support the tags, which allow you to give keywords and a description to your page. There are certain search engines which do not support the description tag.

META DESCRIPTION TAG EXAMPLE

<META name=”description” CONTENT=”description of page goes here”>

When the user searches a search engine for a particular phrase related to your webpage, your webpage will show up in the listing. The search page is listed by its title and below that will be the
description. The same description placed in the META description tag.

So using an appropriate description is important, as this will force the user to click the search link. If the user finds the description not relevant to his search chances are he or she will ignore it
irrespective of your page rank. Keep the description short as the search engine will only display limited characters of your description. If the description is too long it will get chopped in the search
listing which again will confuse the user who might ignore your link (web page ).

The second most important META tag is keyword. Keywords are words and phrases which are relevant to a particular document. For example if the webpage is about icecreams then the relevant keywords could be icecreams,flavor,rasberry,chocolate etc. META tags are not seen by the
user until the source code is viewed. Earlier keyword META tags were important but now with more sophisticated search engines the importance of these tags have come down.

In principle only those keywords should be used which are already used somewhere in the document ( web page ). META keywords gives slight boost to the page ranking.Keywords can be separated by commas OR space. It does not matter.

META KEYWORD TAG EXAMPLE

<META name=”keywords” CONTENT=”keywords”>

And finally the third and not so important robots tag. The robot tag is a simple instruction to the search engine spiders on how to treat a webpage with regards to indexing. Following example shows how to instruct a search engine spider index and follow the links on a webpage. Alternately you can use the noindex nofollow parameters, which instructs the spider not to index the page. Of course you have to add robots.txt file to prevent spiders from indexing.

META ROBOTS TAG EXAMPLE

<META name=”robots” CONTENT=”parameters”>