Meta tags were created to give Googlebot the basic information about each webpage. In other words, meta tags make it easier for Googlebot to determine what your webpage is about, and thus meta tags are crucial for SEO.

Webmasters add meta tags to the section of HTML page.

Googlebot perceives the following meta tags:

Webmasters use this tag to give Googlebot a short description of the webpage. The content of this tag can be used as a part of the snippet shown in SERP.

The Title of the Webpage
The content of this tag is usually shown as the title in SERP

These meta tags control the behavior of crawling and indexing. Googlebot perceives the following values:

– noindex – forbids Google to index the webpage.

– nofollow – forbids the Googlebot to follow links from the webpage.

– noindex / follow – is used to prevent from indexing, but still relate this webpage to the pages that link out of it.

– noindex, nofollow – this tag prevent a webpage from being indexed and followed.

You can easily analyze how Googlebot indexes each webpage of your website with web crawler :