Meta tags are information inserted into the "head" area of your web pages.
Other than the title tag (which is visible in the title bar of a browser), information in the head area of your web pages is not seen by those viewing your pages in browsers.
Instead, meta information in this area is used to communicate information that a human visitor may not be concerned with. Eg: tell a browser what "character set" to use.
Eg: 2x common types of meta tags
<head>
<title>andrews ufo site</title>
<meta name="description" content="latest news on ufos" />
<meta name="keywords" content="ufo, saucers, aliens" />
</head>
Meta description tag:
Used to influence the description of your page in the crawlers that support the tag.
Generally, 200 to 250 characters in the content attribute my be indexed, though only a small portion will be visible.
Meta keywords tag:
Allows you to provide additional text for crawler-based search engines to index.
Words in here work with your body text (text in the body of html, ie: actual page content) to help seo, but only for the crawlers that support it. Note: only a few crawlers support it.
Synonyms words can be added into content here.
You should include 20-25 words or phrases, with each word or phrase separated by commas.
Meta robots tag:
This lets you specify that a particular page should not be indexed by a search engine.
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"/>
You should also use robots.txt file to block indexing, which is more efficient as you don't need to add this tag to every page.
