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Meta Tags and Search Engines
There are a couple of common misconceptions about meta tags, and both revolve around using meta tags to help the search engine "spiders" index a site.
First, is that your pages do not have to have meta tags in order for the spiders to find and index it.
Spiders find your page whether or not it has meta tags. The tags do, however, help some spiders index it in the way you want it indexed.
Second, is that you can not control the exact way your site is indexed by using some magic formula of meta tags. For some spiders, the meta tags provide guidelines, but the content of meta tags is weighed with other factors, and each spider uses meta tag information differently.
It's a good idea to include meta tags in your pages, but don't expect miracles. Use meta tags intelligently, to increase your odds of having readers who are truly interested in your content, find your site.
Before detailing the meta tags than can help along the search process, it is helpful to understand a little more about how searches on the web work.
The search spider. Some of the search/directory services employ spiders; others don't. The spider is an automatic agent that goes out and searches the web for anything new. It turns its results into an index.
The index is a listing of all the content the search service knows about. Some services, like Alta Vista and Excite, use primarily spider-generated indices. Others, like Yahoo, are primarily directories.
Directories are compiled, organized sets of sites. There is typically some human intervention which says "swamp-lands real estate is a type of business that belongs in the regional/business category." Directories don't include every single page on the web but, by limiting themselves, they can often be more useful, if less comprehensive.
META tags for search engine indexing
META tags are used to help some search engines index your page, especially if your page has frames.
META tags should be placed between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags of your document. The most common META tags are going to look like this:
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Use a title </TITLE>
<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="A brief description">
<META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="list any and all keywords here">
</HEAD>
This is all you need in the "<HEAD>" of your web page.
There are other "META" tags you can put there but they are not necessary.
Avoiding Indexing
You can also use meta tags to avoid having your page indexed. If your page is created for a small group of people, if you'd rather not have random browsers hitting your site, or if your site is live but still under construction or otherwise not ready for *prime time* viewing, you might not want it to be indexed.
You avoid indexing by using a meta tag named robots. Not all spiders honor this meta tag, but several do and more are rumored to be planning on supporting it. Robots tags looks like this:
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="noindex">
Using a robots meta tag and setting its content value to "noindex" tells the search spider to skip this page when it builds its index.
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