Using the Robots Meta Tag

Using the robots meta tag you can exclude any HTMLbased content from a web site on a page-by-page basis, and it is frequently an easier method to use when eliminating duplicate content from a preexisting site for which the source code is available, or when a site contains many complex dynamic URLs.

To exclude a page with meta-exclusion, simply place the following code in the < head > section of the
HTML document you want to exclude:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow” />

This indicates that the page should not be indexed (noindex) and none of the links on the page should
be followed (nofollow). It is relatively easy to apply some simple programming logic to decide whether
or not to include such a meta tag on the pages of your site. It will always be applicable, so long as you
have access to the source code of the application, whereas robots.txt exclusion may be difficult or
even impossible to apply in certain cases.

To exclude a specific spider, change “robots” to the name of the spider — for example googlebot,
msnbot, or slurp. To exclude multiple spiders, you can use multiple meta tags. For example, to
exclude googlebot and msnbot:

<meta name=”googlebot” content=”noindex, nofollow” />
<meta name=”msnbot” content=”noindex, nofollow” />

The only downside is that the page must be fetched in order to determine that it should not be indexed in the first place. This is likely to slow down indexing.

On-Site Optimization for Search Engines

On-site Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to the actions you take on your website to make your site appeal to the search engines. These include actions like the words you choose to use in the navigation links, meta tags, and the words within your content.

Meta tags are snippets of code you can include on your website to give the search engines more information on what your site is about. Visitors to your webpage won’t be able to see this information, but the search engine programs that scour your site will appreciate the tip off.

Alternatively, you don’t want to frustrate the search engine robots by bogging down your site with loads of pictures and flash animations. Search engines rely on the words and phrases on your site to get a feel for what it’s about, so that they know when to pull your site up in response to user search terms. If the search engine robots encounter lots of images or movie files, they won’t be able to figure out what your site is about and as a result, it will surely rank lower in the search results.

It’s important to get your on-site optimization right because you control it (as opposed to the off-site). The following are a couple of quick, but important on-site SEO principles to implement.

First, if you’re aiming for high search engine rankings, you’ll want to focus each page on a particular keyord or keyphrase. As mentioned earlier, an ideal keyphrase is not too competitive, but still searched for frequently in the search engines. Once you’ve identified your target keyphrase, you’ll want to write content that includes this keyphrase about 2-5% of the time. Don’t go overboard – your content should still sound natural. In the short run, you can trick the search engines by stuffing a page full of your target keyphrase, repeated over and over again, but this is a poor long-term strategy.

Second, the domain name you choose is important as well. The domain name should reflect the main keyphrase for your site and, whenever possible, be a .com domain. Although most experts disagree whether a continuous domain is better than a dashed domain – “www.makemoneyonline.com” versus “www.make-money-online.com” – it is becoming increasingly clear that .com domain names are given more weight than some of the other extensions, like .info or .us.

Basics of Meta Tags

Allrite.. Lets get started with the Meta tags. The most basic seo technique. Meta Tags are HTML tags used to describe the content of the page. Every page is related to something, e.g a website about mobile phones have the content related to mobiles. That could be mobile phone pictures, articles, prices, or maybe some applications for cell phones. So to let the search engine know what is your page is actually about, we use Meta Tags. The meta tags look like this


<meta name="keywords" content="(Keywords here)">


every webpage have this element by default. We just need to change the content area with the required keywords. What that do is it tells the search engine spider about the key phrases that have been used in a specific page. Now when the spider reads that tag, it automatically indexes the page against these keywords.


Meta Tags are not used by google anymore. Because many webmasters have exploited this feature and stuffed the meta tags with irrelevant keywords. But this is still used by other major search engines like Yahoo,bing,ask etc. So their importance is still there and one needs to pay attention on them as well. There is one more Meta tag used by search engines is:


<meta name="description" content="(description here)">


Now as it is clear from the name. This meta tag includes the brief summary of the content of the page. Whenever You search something on a search engine. It displays a brief text about the website just below its link. Meta description should not be more than 160 characters. And it is a good practice to use a few keywords in your description as well. But make sure not to stuff it with keywords. It should be written for humans not just for the search engine spider. Because whenever someone searches something, they always take a look at the description text to see what the page is about. So the more relevant the description is, the more chances are that your link will get clicked. So the first thing you wanna do as an seo of your website is to optimize the meta tags of your website.