While search engine bots and search engine optimization methods have become more complicated and intricate in recent years, meta tags still provide benefits of use and allow indexing to be done quicker and more efficiently, which generally leads to more appropriate indexing and ranking methods.  Meta tags can come in a variety of forms and each has its own importance in aiding crawlers and bots with determining exactly what the particular web page is about and how to categorize it.  Here are a few of the most commonly used meta tags with information on why including each of these in every web page so important.

Title Meta Tag

Even though this may not technically be a meta tag, the HTML title tag is highly important in making sure that your site appears properly and is displayed in relevant search results.  This piece of code is what displays the title of the page at the top of any web browser and search engine crawlers use this information to determine in which specific search results the page in question will be displayed.  Besides this, the title of the page is obviously also the text that will be displayed for your page in search results, so it is a good idea to make sure that the title tags indicate the content or subject of the web page.

Description Meta Tag

The meta description tag serves as the general description of your page and will display in search results below your web page’s link.  While it is considered sensible to have this information encoded into your page’s HTML layout, not every search engine will pick this information up and use it.  For example, Google tends to generate its own description for each individual page, while Bing generally copies the meta description and uses it word for word.  It is recommended to use the first one or two sentences of the page in question as your meta description; this will increase your status with many search engine spiders and therefore, your page ranking in certain search queries.

Keywords Meta Tag

Very few search engine bots and spiders read this anymore, but the ones that do still demand some consistency in between the meta keywords and the content of the site.  When using this meta tag, make sure to only include keywords that are also mentioned somewhere else on the page.  If you put ‘meta tag generator’ in your keywords for example but fail to mention that anywhere else on the page, it is virtually guaranteed that the keyword will not be picked up by bots and indexed accordingly.

Extract Meta Tags From Your Page

If you want to see exactly what search engine bots and spiders are seeing when it comes to meta data on your site, then you may find the Meta Tag Extractor tool from Pingler helpful.  By entering the URL of the desired page, you can view all of the meta tags and data associated with the particular page and can then determine whether or not your information is being displayed correctly for bots and spiders to index.