Meta tags for robots, keywords and the description.
In this lesson you are going to add <meta> tags to the <head> section of your page and you are going to tell the search engine robots what to do.
What are meta tags
The meta tag contains valuable information for search robots to use in adding your web pages to their search indexes. A number of search engines use the information within tags as part of their algorithms. We strongly recommend that you implement META tags that describe the content and keywords of your web site and its web pages.
Why we use meta tags
The Internet is constantly crawled by robots. Search engines send out these robots (also known as spiders or bots) to collect information about the Internet. Robots work by following links from one page to another and they are always at work.
When a robot comes to your site, the first thing it does, is look for permission to crawl your site. You want to make sure that the Welcome Matt is out. You do this either by placing a robots.txt file in your web site Root Directory or a <meta> tag directive.
Since this tutorial is about meta tags we are going to use the <meta> tag in our web page. This little string of html code tells all robots that they have permission to crawl your site.
<meta name="robots" content="all" />
Now when a robot comes to your site it will crawl your pages and gather the information that it needs to list your web site in its database. This is how you get listed in search engines.
The meta description and keywords
When a search engine list your site in its search results it uses your <meta name description /> in that listing. The description of your site should be short and to the point. The description of my example web page would be "how to build a picnic table" and that is what would display in the serp's. No fluff, no sales pitch. All you want to do is tell the person searching what your web page is about.
Each page in your web site should have its own separate and distinct description and keyword meta tag. An accurate and descriptive title and a robots meta tag should also be included on each page.
Keywords are how people find your web site! When someone types a search word or phrase into the search box and clicks "GO". The search engine scans its database of web sites that used that term as a keyword and shows the results. In a perfect world, if someone typed in "picnic table", my example site would be the top result. You can learn more about keywords here.
<head>
<title> How to build a picnic table </title>
<meta name="description" content="A description of your page goes here." />
<meta name="keywords" content="A few of the most relevant words from your page content." />
<meta name="robots" content="all" />
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
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To add a table to your web page