Meta tag

[sybrant]

Does Meta tag contains only meta description and meta tag as main or is there anything else ?

[Sujan]

Meta Tag contains the meta data. Meta Title, Description, keyword, Robots tags are important.

[HenryGary]

< meta > element can provide information about the page of the yuan (meta-information), such as for search engines and update frequency of the description and keywords. < meta > tag in the document's head, do not contain any content. < meta > tag defines the attributes with documentation associated name/value pairs.

[Theodore Ross]

Do you guys think that using meta descriptions are still relevant in the SEO field today?

[mjtaylor]

Do you guys think that using meta descriptions are still relevant in the SEO field today?

Yes, After the Meta Title Tag Search Engines are fetching the information of the website from Meta Description Tag.

Meta Tag contains the meta data. Meta Title, Description, keyword, Robots tags are important.

What robot tags and why are they important?

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Do you guys think that using meta descriptions are still relevant in the SEO field today?

Meta descriptions have no direct impact on your ranking, or SEO, per se - except in the broadest sense of SEO: optimizing your site's appearance and appeal in the SERPs. But the description is not used by SEs to determine your website's rank. It is however, used by searchers to decide whether to click on your site. So, it's a very important tool for making your site attractive to users.

[Sujan]

<meta name="robots" content="index, follow, archive">
I think this will allow the SE Robots to crawl. Let me know your opinion.

[mjtaylor]

I think they can crawl without it, can't they?

But I asked the question to encourage you to offer more complete information when you post.

[weegillis]

META is a term derived from the Greek that means "above" and/or "beyond", or "among". In a 'metaphor' the meaning is present but unseen until we look beyond the contextual meaning of the term or phrase.

META data in a web page is just that, unseen, but present for the purpose of giving a description to a document. As mentioned above by mjtaylor, it is not crucial to SEO, in the same sense as the seen content of a document, but invaluable to a user or user agent, especially if it is succinct and accurate.

TITLE is not meta data, and as we can see, it is visible to the user in the browser's title bar. The page's description and keyword list are unseen, but still relate to the page, so they are meta data.

The robots directive is also unseen by the user, and relates to the document, so is also meta data. It is only required when one wants the robots to follow different instructions than the defaults, 'index', 'follow', 'snippet' and 'archive'. The default robot behavior requires no instruction, therefore the tag can be left out of a page as it is redundant. Were we to want any of the above to include 'no' then we would need the tag, but only for those 'no' values, not the defaults.

<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />
<meta name="robots" content="nofollow" />
<meta name="robots" content="nosnippet" />
<meta name="robots" content="noarchive" />

<!-- OR simply -->
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow,nosnippet,noarchive" />

If we want a robot to index and follow, but not to create a snippet and not to archive, we could write this,

<meta name="robots" content="index,follow,nosnippet,noarchive" />

but really only need to write this to convey the same message,

<meta name="robots" content="nosnippet,noarchive" />

since robots default is to index and to follow, and they don't need to be told what they already do.


Aside:

@Sujan: We notice that you tend to place a lot of stress on META tags in your site reviews. I hope you are boning up on all the best advice so you can truly help people, rather than just steer them into something they might not fully understand.

[Sarah997]

but now SEO experts are using "Rich Snippets" Micro data instead of Meta tags as Google also like them and fetches data from them. For example Google prefers itemprop="description" instead of Meta description tag. What do u people suggest ?

[weegillis]

@Sara997: "the members," as opposed to, "u people," might present a little better. I hope you get my meaning.

In response to your point about Rich Snippets, if, and this is a BIG IF, you are really confident in the content and structure or your site, then by all means, upgrade the meta data. I wouldn't suggest this be at the top of anyone's list, however. One needs to dot all the "i's" and cross all the "t's" before committing to this level of search and indexing documentation. It is serious work, and must be consistently maintained.

For a normal site, just following the basic steps of site structure, content preparation, link building, etc. will give you a good chance of top placement for your unique content. Leave Rich Snippets to the SEO experts, and you and I can have the nuts and bolts SEO.

As is brought up often in these sorts of discussion, while G is the biggest, they are not the only player in the search world, and theirs isn't the only user agent to parse and use META tag attributes. Some we may never have to use, such as screen readers, text readers, and other adaptive technology, so we will never know the full impact of properly documented meta tags.

META tags were not created for SEARCH; they were created for USER AGENT's of which search robots are just one kind of many. As such, these tags are by no means obsolete. Their abuse, however, has lead to search engines giving them a sideways glance. Keywords, for instance are less and less meaningful, and serve no one anymore, it would seem. Their abuse over the years has relegated the meta data to the sidelines. Yet used properly, this data can go a long way toward properly indexing a page. Such a waste.