What are Meta tags ?
Meta tags are used to summarize information of a page for search engine
crawlers. This information is not directly visibles to humans visiting
your website. The most popular are the meta keywords and description
tag. These meta tags to be inserted into the area of your page.
A couple of years ago meta tags were the primary tool for search engine
optimization and there was a direct correlation between keywords in the
meta tags and your ranking in the search results. However, algorithms
have got better and today the importance of metadata is decreasing day
by day.
Meta Description
The meta Description tag is are one more way for you to write a
description of your site, thus pointing search engines to what themes
and topics your Web site is relevant to. Some search engines (including
Google) use these meta description display a summary of the listings on
the search results page. So if your meta descriptions are well written
you might be able to attract more traffic to your website.
For instance, for the dog adoption site, the meta Description tag could be something like this:
<Meta
Name=“Description“ Content=“Adopting a dog saves a life and brings joy
to your house. All you need to know when you consider adopting a
dog.“>
Meta Keywords
A potential use of the Meta Keywords tags is to include a list of
keywords that you think are relevant to your pages. The major search
engines will not take this into account but still it is a chance for you
to emphasize your target keywords. You may consider including
alternative spellings (or even common misspellings of your keywords) in
the meta Keywords tag. It might be a very small boost to your search
engine rankings but why miss the chance?
eg.
<Meta name=“Keywords“ Content=“adopt, adoption, dog, dogs, puppy, canine, save a life, homeless animals“>
Meta Robots
In this tag you specify the pages that you do NOT want crawled and
indexed. It happens that on your site you have contents that you need to
keep there but you don't want it indexed. Listing this pages in the
Meta Robots tag is one way to exclude them (the other way is by using a
robots.txt file and generally this is the better way to do it) from
being indexed.
eg.
<META NAME=“ROBOTS“ CONTENT=“NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW“>