Search engine optimizations or SEO are elements website and blog owners need to familiarize themselves with. This is because they are what helps the search engines find your site among the millions on the web.
Meta tags in particular are important to include on your blog or website pages so they can be located by robots (sometimes called spiderbots or simply bots) and send traffic to the most appropriate websites. These robots use the data they find on your website or blog to build their database.
So what are meta tags anyway? Meta tags are snippets of HTML codes put in the header on a website. They are hidden from view of the website visitor because their function is to provide the search engines with enough information about your site to send traffic to it.
These meta tags also serve to give directions to the bots that scan websites. Meta tags tell the bots whether or not you want a particular page on your site to be indexed or not. If for example you have a WordPress blog, on your dashboard page for your posts you can select any one of the following:
- index, follow
- index, nofollow
- noindex, follow
- noindex, nofollow
Let’s discuss what they all mean.
Index, follow = The robot will follow these instructions and index every page of your website or blog. By indexing, the robots pull out the words that are significant on your page, usually your keywords!
Index, nofollow = The robot now will only look only at this page and no further.
noindex, follow = This tells the robot to not look at this page but it will crawl through all of the remaining pages on your website.
noindex, no follow = The instructions for the robot here is to simply not to look at this page and not to crawl through the remaining pages.
So why might you choose not to have a page on your site indexed? Reasons for not having pages in your website or blog indexed vary. They may include any of the following but certainly aren’t limited to only these:
- It is a page full of data, used perhaps as references and not something necessary for the spiders to go through.
- Maybe you have a page or two that are temporary so until you make the page a permanent part of your website, you don’t want the spider robots to crawl it.
- Or, you may want the page to be kept more private by not having it indexed by the robots.
If you aren’t using a web page or blog that already gives you the choices of how you would like to index your web pages, then you will need to insert HTML code This code is put in the header of your web page(s) (meaning between the
and tags), in the form of a meta tag. The code looks like this:
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow">
<meta name="robots" content="index,nofollow">
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">
Now that you have a better understanding of robot meta tags you can implement the codes appropriate for your site. The Google default is” index, follow” so if this isn’t what you want, you’ll need to give the robots, spiderbots or bots other instructions.
