Written by John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Zürich

In writing and maintaining accurate meta tags (e.g., descriptive titles and robots information), you help Google to more accurately crawl, index and return your site in search results. Meta tags provide information to all sorts of clients, such as browsers and search engines. Just keep in mind that each client will likely only interpret the meta tags that it uses, and ignore the rest (although they might be useful for other reasons).

Here’s how Google would interpret meta tags of this sample HTML page:

<!DOCTYPE …><head>  
<title>Traditional Swiss cheese fondue recipes<title> utilized by Google, accuracy is valuable to webmasters
<meta name=”description” content=”Cheese fondue is …”> utilized by Google, can be shown in our search results
<meta name=”revisit-after” content=”14 days”> not utilized by Google or other major search engines
<META name=”verify-v1″ content=”e8JG…Nw=” /> optional, for Google webmaster tools
<meta name=”GoogleBot” content=”noOdp”> optional
<meta …>  
<meta …>  
</head>  

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