Meta tags are tags placed in the head portion of the HTML page and are intended to provide certain information to browsers and search engines such as description, keywords, copyright and other unessential information.



Their format is: META NAME="tag name" CONTENT="value"



The following meta tags are most often mentioned in connection with
SEO: "description", "keywords", "robots" and "revisit-after".



META NAME="description" CONTENT="the description of your page"



You can use this tag to add a descriptive summary of the page's
content. It will not help you to achieve better rankings in Google and will do very little for it in Yahoo!, but if the keyphrase that was searched on is in the descritpion tag Google and Yahoo! will use the content of your "description" meta tag when your site is listed in their result pages. Using this as a marketing device would better serve you than trying to stuff your keywords.



META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="your keywords"



This tag is ignored by Google, but some search engines pay some
attention to it. Do not stuff keywords here either as it won't help and can hurt you in some cases. Separate your keywords
using blank spaces or commas - it makes no difference unless you are submitting to directories. Some directories will read your site and request commas and some request spaces. I would do commas without a space.



The tag is optional.



META NAME="revisit-after" CONTENT="10 days"



This can be set at 15 days, 7 days, 1 day or whatever you like. Many
webmasters add this tag to their pages in the hope that it will force
a visiting spider to come and re-crawl the page at a frequency of
their choosing. It does nothing of the kind. Most spiders simply
ignore the tag, and many interpret it quite the other way, which
is: "Do not come earlier than instructed". If your pages contain this
tag, remove it.



META NAME="robots" CONTENT="INDEX,FOLLOW"



This tag tells the spiders to index the page and follow all the links
that can be found on it. This is true by default, so there is no need
to add this tag.



Use META NAME="robots" CONTENT="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW" if you do not
wish the spiders to read and index this particular page.
Use META NAME="robots" CONTENT="INDEX,NOFOLLOW" if you do not want
them to follow the links on the page.



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