3. Meta Tag

Meta Tag is like definition of your website. It includes various parameters through which your website is uniquely identified.
This is the most important Tag for any website because any search engine will update their list on meta tags.

Check List :
- Choose Proper Meta Tag for your website. Provide the perfect information on given tag values.
[Keywords, Description, Author, Copyright meta name, Robots, slurp, distribution, http-equiv]

Details of every meta Tag values are as below.

i) Keywords :
This meta name includes the Keywords which are relevant to your page.
Put the right keywords in this tag, so search engine can recognise your web page based upon the keywords.

Tips :
Don't put any random keywords in this tag. Find out your competitors keywords and try out with your website content. Best tool to get the keyword Ideas are
http://www.google.com/sktool/
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
These are the keywords on which search engine will list the matching keywords related to your website. It is also used to maintain its linking structure. You can add the meta tag for Keywords as below. For example
meta name="keywords" content="My website, Sample website,..."

ii) Description:
This tag value stands for a brief description about the website.

Tips:
It should not be as much long as a few paragraphs and not as much short as few words. Try to give a brief description about the site in 20 to 40 words. Try to cover most of the words that your website related to.

For example, if you website is related with Clothes, try to cover the description about what kind of clothes, fashion, Design, style that your website is offering in your description.

iii) Author/Copyright meta name :
This meta tag value stands to tell something about the Author of the Content published on the website. For example
meta name="author" content="Hii, this is me."
meta name="copyright" content="Copyright 2009 My company, All Rights Reserved."

Over here you can use define the author of the give content. This will work just as a data entry of the content. It should not reflect anywhere in search engine. But for the programming, its very good practise to define the necessary comments.

iv) Robots :
This tag invites the crawler to go ahead or to stop on certain point. Crawler is kind a program which checks every website on behalf of the search engine, and list the particular website according to various criteria.

Tips:
There are few content values that we can pass it to the robots tag. For example
meta name="robots" content="index,follow,noodp"

Let's look more on these content values and what they stands for.

Index : It tells robot to index your particular website, its content, and its related links.

Follow : Robots traverse your website to top to bottom. whenever robots find the links, it will follow it and traverse that particular page. And from that robot will able to completed most of the pages and based upon that robot will able to calculate the page rank and other stuff.

NoOdp : It will tell Robots to get the information from the site itself rather than fetching the information from ODP ( Open Directory Project ). ODP contains the description of the all the website underneath of various branch indexes.
[ If your site is not available in ODP, its wise to have it listed. Because most of the search engine, finds your website description from the ODP. ]
If your site content is changed then whatever you submitted in ODP then this value used to tell search engine that don't use the ODP description.

Similarly, Nofollow parameter tells robots to not to traverse on that path. Generally web admin put nofollow tag on their Payment folders and other necessary secured information folders, so it will not search by any search engine.

v) slurp:
It is the same as ODP. Yahoo uses the different search engine. So this parameter let yahoo crawler to find the information in yahoo directories of have to find the description from the site itself.

vi) distribution:
In this tag value, you can provide the copyright and distribution rights of your website. For example
meta name="distribution" content="global"

vii) Others :
There are also other kind of attributes that meta tag offers such as
http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" - Used for the visibility of the content on various browsers and browser versions.
For example, IE 8 beta or IE 8 web browser with IE 7 emulated version. For example meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7"

http-equiv="Content-type" - Used for the content type of the website. For example
meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8"