To understand the role of meta tags, you need to first understand what they are all about. Title, Description, Keywords, and Robots are four of the most commonly used tags. These tags are simple HTML elements inserted in the 'head' area of your pages' coding. Apart from the Title tag, a human visitor will not be able to view any other meta on your web page. This is because, all the other info is meant only for the purpose of search engine indexing.
Title Tag
It is the text displayed on reverse bar of an Internet browser window when a page is viewed. It is also the text that gets bookmarked when a user adds a web page to his 'favourites' list. Usually taken as 60 characters, it plays a big role in determining the success of your web site's optimization campaign. Most search engine crawlers take the Title tag as the title of your page in their result listings. Therefore, you should incorporate your main keywords and briefly define your web page through this tag.
Meta Description Tag
It is the description of a web page that is shown in result listings on an SERP. Although search engine crawlers index about 250 characters in a description, they usually display only a few words. It is imperative to remember here that not all search engines read the description tag as presented by you. Some, like Google, pick the description from the content of the page in question. Therefore, you should judiciously use your essential keywords all across the content of your site.
Meta Keywords Tag
This is the additional text that is crawled with the main content of a web page. The words or phrases used in this tag should be competitive and traffic oriented. This tag helps you in catering to keywords that are indirectly related to your page.
Robots Tag
This meta tag allows you to control whether search engine spiders can index a web page or not. The 'NoIndex' and 'NoFollow' attributes respectively indicate that a page is not to be indexed and a link is not to be followed by search engines. This affordable technique helps you keep certain sections of your web site private and inaccessible.
Meta tags cannot guarantee top rankings in search engine indexing. But, they do influence the way your web pages are described. In fact, they give optimizers the control to determine the same.
