Wed Dec 26 13:03:15 PST 2018

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The meta description tag can often be used to help craft a good search presentation
for your most popular keyword phrases by complementing the page title, targeting
alternet versions, and display your brand messaging, all while inticing clickthroughs.
You can look at the search results of various search engines to see what
competitors uses and how many characters the engine displays. In the above image
Google displayed around 156 characters.
Meta Tags Are Not an Endless Art
Some people try to make meta tags sound like an art form. They are not. There
are multiple tags that tell a search engine when to revisit or what language it is in.
These tags are usually irrelevant and ignored.
Just about the only useful meta tags other than the description and keywords tags
are those tags used to PREVENT search engines from indexing your content.
Since we usually want our content seen, I only wrote about the tags I typically use.
The Truth about Meta Tags
Meta tags are only one small part of search engine algorithms. In major search
engines, each of the following is typically far more important than meta tags:
? Link popularity and link reputation
? Site age
? Page title
? Page copy

Your meta description tags are still important because they help you
differentiate yourself from the competition and boost your clickthrough rates.
Robots Exclusion Standard
When primitive robots were first created, some of them would crash servers by
requesting too many pages too quickly. A robots exclusion standard was crafted to
allow you to tell any robot (or all of them
that you do not want some of your
pages indexed or that you do not want your links followed. You can do this via a
meta tag on the page copy


or create a robots.txt file that gets placed in the root of your website. The goal of
either of these methods is to tell the robots where NOT to go. The official robots
exclusion protocol document is located at the following URL.
http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion.html