Meta elements provide information about a given Web page, most often to help search engines categorize them correctly. They are inserted into the HTML document, but are often not directly visible to a user visiting the site.

They have been the focus of a field of marketing research known as search engine optimization (SEO), where different methods are explored to provide a user's site with a higher ranking on search engines. In the mid to late 1990s, search engines were reliant on meta data to correctly classify a Web page and webmasters quickly learned the commercial significance of having the right meta element, as it frequently led to a high ranking in the search engines — and thus, high traffic to the website.

As search engine traffic achieved greater significance in online marketing plans, consultants were brought in who were well versed in how search engines perceive a website. These consultants used a variety of techniques (legitimate and otherwise) to improve ranking for their clients.

Meta Description

                       

                  The description attribute provides a concise explanation of a Web page's content. This allows the Web page authors to give a more meaningful description for listings that might be displayed if the search engine was unable to automatically create its own description based on the page content.  Almost all search engines recommend it to be shorter than 155 characters of plain text. The Character Counter tool can help you.

Note: If Meta description appears for all pages in your blog then search engine robots would think that all your pages are having same description. Since robots deal each page as a separate website therefore your blog could get penalized for using same meta description over and over again. To avoid this two pieces of codes are added before and after meta description so that it may appear to robots at homepage only. Following are the two codes added to the tool by default:

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == data:blog.homepageUrl'> 

<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Your Blog description"> 

</b:if>

Meta Keywords

                      They keywords tag is not usually displayed in search results and is a hidden input which page viewers can not see unless they use the view source function.

• Not important: It is not used by most search engines since it is highly susceptible to spam and users never see it.
• Should consist of a couple of the main keywords used to describe that page.
• Former Yahoo! Search engineer Jon Glick stated that the meta keywords tag is used for inclusion within a subset of search results, and has no effect on relevancy.
• Is only created for machines.

Meta Author

                    If you don't want to add your name then simply leave the blank empty in the tool.Meta Author is not a very important tag but still many bloggers likes to attach his name to his website/blog so why should you left behind!. Simply write your full name and avoid using nicknames or special symbols.

Meta Robot

                     The robots attribute, supported by several major search engines, controls whether search engine spiders are allowed to index a page, or not, and whether they should follow links from a page, or not. The attribute can contain one or more comma-separate values. The no index value prevents a page from being indexed, and no follow prevents links from being crawled. Other values recognized by one or more search engines can influence how the engine indexes pages, and how those pages appear on the search results.

By default blogger tags all blogs as ALL

If you don't want to be bothered with this tag then simply leave the blank empty in the tool below.