The meta keywords tag is
typically used to highlight
a couple of the main
keyword phrases on which
a page is focused.
The meta description tag
should be a few sentences
to a paragraph of text that
uses various versions of
your keywords and
describes the purpose of a
given page.
Meta tags are only one
small element of current
search engine ranking
algorithms.

When people refer to meta tags, they are talking about the meta description and
meta keyword tags. Some search engines may display the meta description as part
of the search results, but the meta keywords tags generally does not appear in
search results.

Is it Worth it to Create Meta Tags?
I believe creating page specific meta description tags is worthwhile. I generally do
not spend time creating meta keywords tags.
What do Meta Tags Look Like?

<meta name=”keywords” content=”seo book, seo ebook, seo e-book,
seo tutorial, seo tutorial book, search engine optimisation,
search engine optimisation tutorial”>
<META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=”Search Engine Optimization
Book is a SEO blog that provides daily search engine news. SEO
Book keeps up with the latest trends in search engine algorithm
changes and provides new SEO tips.”>

Meta Keywords Tag

If your site does not have meta keyword tags, I would probably not recommend
spending the time to add them. If you add meta keywords while you are creating
pages, I wouldn’t spend more than a minute on each page. I probably wouldn’t list
any more than a few of them per page.
The meta keywords tag is not supported by many major search engines. While it is
important to choose the correct keywords for your page, the meta keywords tag
itself is not used by many top SEO experts.
I usually do not use the meta keywords tag on my pages (as it is not usually very
important), but it can help you out if there are many different ways to say your

product names and you are not creative enough to cover the permutations in your
page copy. Usually it is better to cover the permutations in your page copy with
sections like alternate part numbers, etc.
If you use the meta keywords tag, it should be unique for each page upon which
you place it. The keywords tag is a good place to put common misspellings,
synonyms, and alternate versions of a word.

Sample Uses of the Meta Keywords Tag

If you optimized a page for the keyword phrase drop shipping, you may
want to include the word dropshipping in your keywords tag, although if
the term is that competitive, keyword tags are not likely to matter.
• Notice how in my above example meta keyword tag, I spelled the word
optimization with an “s”. I targeted the spelling with a “z” on my page
and am placing “s” versions in my keywords tag. The term is likely
going to be too competitive to compete for using just a meta tag, but
most phrases are not going to be as competitive as search engine
optimisation.
• Some items are model 15-M or 15M or Cannon 15-M or Cannon 15M.
• Prescription is often mistyped as perscription.
If a term is competitive, it is going to need to occur in your page copy and/or
inbound link text for you to rank well for it.

Meta Description Tag

Many search engines will use the meta description as part of the page abstract if the
exact search term that was searched for is found in the meta description tag.
Additionally, it sometimes appears in search results if the search engine cannot
extract meaningful content from the page copy or if the algorithm feels the meta
description will provide a more useful presentation.

This tag should be between a sentance to a paragraph and should not appear
keyword-stuffed. The text should read well to the human eye since this tag is still
used in many search results pages. A good or bad description can be the difference
between a click and being ignored. Google shows ~ 160 characters from the meta
description tag in their search results.
If you write a compelling description, it could boost your click-through
rates and, thus, deliver you more targeted traffic.

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

You do not need to use a robots.txt file. By default, search engines will index your
site. If you do create a robots.txt file, it goes in the root level of your domain using
robots.txt as the file name.
This allows all robots to index everything:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
This disallows all robots to your site:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
You also can disallow a folder or a single file in the robots txt file. This disallows a
folder:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /projects/
This disallows a file:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cheese/please.html
If you make a robots.txt user-agent command for a specific search engine (e.g.
User-agent:Googlebot) the associated search engine will ignore the more general
rules located in the section for all search engines (User-agent: *).
One problem many dynamic sites have is sending search engines multiple URLs
with nearly identical content. If you have products in different sizes and colors, or
other small differences, it is likely that you could generate lots of near-duplicate
content, which will prevent search engines from fully indexing your sites.
If you place your variables at the start of your URLs, then you can easily block all
of the sorting options using only a few disallow lines. For example, the following
would block search engines from indexing any URLs that start with ‘cart.php?size’
or ‘cart.php?color’.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cart.php?size
Disallow: /cart.php?color
Notice how there is no trailing slash at the end of the above disallow lines. That
means the engines will not index anything that starts with that in the URL. If there
were a trailing slash, search engines would only block a specific folder.
If the sort options were at the end of the URL, you would either need to create an
exceptionally long robots.txt file or place the robots noindex meta tags inside the
sort pages. You also can specify any specific user agent, such as Googlebot, instead
of using the asterisk wild card. Many bad bots will ignore your robots txt files
and/or harvest the blocked information, so you do not want to use robots.txt to
block individuals from finding confidential information.

Googlebot also supports wildcards in the robots.txt. The following would stop
Googlebot from reading any URL that includes the string ‘sort=’ no matter where
that string occurs in the URL:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*sort=
In 2006 Yahoo! also added robots.txt wildcard support. Their example pages is
useful for helping you understand how to structure your robots.txt file

http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000372.html

You have to be careful when changing your robots.txt file, because the
following code
Disallow: /*page
also blocks a file like this from being indexed in Google
beauty-pageants.php
Google’s Webmaster Toolset shows you what pages they have tried crawling that
you have already blocked via robots.txt, and they have a robots.txt testing tool
which will show you if a specific URL would end up getting blocked by your
robots.txt file.
In 2007 Google released an unavailable_after meta tag, which tells Google to not
crawl a URL after a specific date. I do not recommend using this. Instead, if one of
your old URLs ranks where you would like a new one to rank I recommend 301
redirecting it to the URL you want to rank.