Meta Elements: A Field Guide - Meta Element: Description Attribute
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This handy little fellow, unlike its cousin the keyword attribute, is still supported by the majority of the big search engines. Google uses it as a fallback when someone wishes to use the "related: query" to find out information about a given page.
The description attribute is used to describe a page's content. Search engines take this description and display it on their result pages when users search for certain terms. Typically you will want to limit your description to less than 200 characters and always remember that the majority of the time, this text is what the user will use to decide if they want to visit your site.
Here is a sample of how you would write a description of the page:
<html>
<head>
<meta name="description" content="Tutorials on Search Engine Optimization by the best writer in the world, James Payne">
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
Meta Element: Robots Attribute
Not the same, and not as effective as the robots.txt file (also known as the Robots Exclusion Standard), the robots attribute is used to try to control whether or not a spider can crawl your page to index it. It is also used to try to block the spiders from following links from a page or not. Sometimes you might want to link to a page on someone else's website for instance, but not want to give them any "link juice."
A few of the values an attribute can have are as follows:
Noindex - stops a page from being indexed
Nofollow - stops a link from being crawled
Noarchive - stops an engine from storing a cached copy of your page
Nosnippet - stops Google from showing a description under your search engine listing and not show a cached link in the results either
Next: Meta Element: NOODP, NOYDIR, and Robots-NoContent >>
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