Besides relying on content, backlinks, and keywords, website owners must implement different techniques to drive organic traffic to their site and increase conversions. Keeping an eye on your on-page SEO is absolutely fundamental to make your site stand out against your competitors.

Search engine optimization is a broad field covering many aspects that help enhance a website’s performance and rankings. One element that plays a significant role in that process is robot meta tags (or directives).

Robot meta directives serve as instructions that tell search engines how you want your site to be indexed.

Depending on how and where they’re used, they can be classified into two groups:

 – Robot meta tags are embedded in your site’s HTML source code and give crawlers firm orders on how to handle your pages. When they are discovered by a search engine, the parameters entered serve as strong suggestions for crawler indexation behavior.

 – X-robots-tags, on the other hand, are included as part of the HTTP header of your website. With them, you are able to control your page’s indexing behavior too. The main difference between them and meta robot tags is that they offer more flexibility and functionality. Why? Because x-robots-tags allow web developers to use regular expressions, execute crawl directives on non-HTML files, and apply parameters at a global level.

When can I implement X-Robots-Tags?

Thanks to their versatility, these tags can bring a wealth of benefits for your site’s optimization. Here are some of the most common instances when an SEO company may want to employ x-robots-tags.

 – Whenever they want to control the indexation of content that’s not written in HTML. These include media like flash or videos.

 – When they want to block a specific element within a page. To achieve that, they place a noindex tag in an image or link.

 – If for some reason they don’t have access to a page’s HTML or if a site uses a global header. X-robots-tags allow developers to control indexation of that specific page.