Meta Keyword Tag:

Do you ignore Meta Keyword tag for your webpages? Don’t do that.

Google seems to ignore Meta keyword tag but still other search engines give some value to it. And you should not ignore this because what all tags are available for SEO should be utilized under the umbrella of White Hat.

• Include keyword phrases between 12 to 15.
• Don’t use a common keyword in all key phrases. You will come under spamming.
• If you have already developed your website without using Meta Keyword tag then I suggest let it be as is. Don’t spend time to insert Meta keywords.
• Each page should have Meta keywords related to the web page content.
• Best usage of Meta keywords is inserting synonyms, misspellings and alternate words.
  • eg1:- in page content use “Web Page”. In Meta keyword use “Webpage”
  • eg2:- in page content use “Enrollment”. In meta keyword use “Enrolment”
  • eg3:- in page content use “Wordpress 2.8″. In meta keyword use “Wordpress 2.x”
  • eg4:- “Prescription” is often mistyped as “Perscription”

Meta Description Tag:

• It is an important tag that you should consider seriously because it will be displayed in the search results.
• It should describe what exactly the page all about is.
  
• Don’t stuff keywords but write the content for human eye.
• Each page should have unique Meta description with keyword phrases included in it.
• Keep the Meta description tag length between 150 – 160 characters. Because anything more than that will cut off in the search result.
  
• If you have already developed your site with title tag more than 160 characters then evaluate if the keywords are covered with-in 160 characters or not. If any keywords are placed after 160 characters then you need to fix it else you can ignore. It will not affect your SEO.
• Do not repeat same sentences and keywords which are already covered in Title tag.
• Display the fact of the content that is not covered/described in the Title tag.
• Dynamic websites that generate single description for all pages need to figure out alternative for it or any plug-in to create Meta descriptions for each page.

Note: When we cover Google Webmaster tool, we are going to see how to check duplicate Meta description in a website.

Meta Robot Tag

• Meta robot tag is used to tell the Robot which page to be indexed/ followed and which should not.
• This tag need to be included in those pages which you don’t want to get indexed. Syntax: <meta content=”noindex,nofollow”>

Robots.txt:

On a server, you may place presentation or documents which you want your prospects to access on demand. When a search engine crawls to your server, it will read all the files and folders available on server including the folder in which you have placed the files for your prospect. Since all the files got indexed in the search engine, when a user searches and the keywords get matched with the files present on the server, those presentations or documents will get displayed in result page. To overcome this issue robots.txt file is used.

• By default search engine robots will crawl in all the folders on your server.
• Robots.txt file is used to tell the search engine which files and folders to be crawled/indexed and which should not be crawled/indexed.
• Robots.txt can only prevent the robots from get crawled on your server, but your pages will be indexed if those links are found by robot on other websites.
• Place the robots.txt file on the root level.
• To write a comment in the robots.txt file use # symbol at the beginning of the line.
• If you don’t want to set robots.txt then at-least make a dummy notepad with the name robots.txt and upload it on the server. It will prevent the 404 error in the log file.
• In a database driven website, most URLs will be passing values in the form of GET methods. To avoid these pages from getting crawled, use this format: Disallow: /*?
• To avoid pages from getting crawled for a particular file extension in the URL, use this format: Disallow: /*.php$
• Use Google Web Master Tool to evaluate any errors in the robots.txt file.

Drawback: Someone can hack or try to steal the data from your website by seeing the robots.txt as all the paths are mentioned in it. Make sure your server security is strong enough.

Creating robots.txt file:

Create a file with the name robots.txt using a text editor (Notepad).

Syntax:

User-agent: Specify the robot name

Disallow: Specify the filename or the directory name

To specify all the robots:

User-agent: *

To specify all the robots starting with the letter “G”:

User-agent: G*

To stop robot from indexing any of the files or directories:

Disallow: /

To stop robot from indexing a particular file or directory:

Disallow: /showcase

Disallow:/default.asp

Simply leave “Disallow” as blank to tell robots to crawl all the files and directories

Example 1:

# Allow Google to index all the files and directories on your server.

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow:

Example 2:

# All search engine spiders not to index specific directories.

User-agent: *

Disallow:/cgi-bin/

Disallow:/download/

If you set general rules that are common for all the search engines robots and rules for a specific robot then the specific robot will ignore the general rules.

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

In the above case, Googlebot will crawl all the pages. Googlebot will ignore “User-agent: *” command.

Download: List of 49 web directories

A simple way to increase your inbound links (Off-page Optimization) is to submit your website in web directories.