First a little definition explaining:

Search Engine Spiders or Crawlers - A web crawler (also known as web spider) is a program which browses World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. Web crawlers are mainly used to create a copy of all visited pages for later processing by a search engine, that will index downloaded pages to provide fast searches.

A web crawler is one type of bot, or software agent. In general, it starts with a list of URLs to visit. As it visits these URLs, it identifies all hyperlinks in page and adds them to list of URLs to visit, recursively browsing Web according to a set of policies.

Robots.txt - The robots exclusion standard or robots.txt protocol is a convention to prevent well-behaved web spiders and other web robots from accessing all or part of a website. The information specifying parts that should not be accessed is specified in a file called robots.txt in top-level directory of website.

The robots.txt protocol is purely advisory, and relies on cooperation of web robot, so that marking an area of your site out of bounds with robots.txt does not guarantee privacy. Many web site administrators have been caught out trying to use robots file to make private parts of a website invisible to rest of world. However file is necessarily publicly available and is easily checked by anyone with a web browser.

The robots.txt patterns are matched by simple substring comparisons, so care should be taken to make sure that patterns matching directories have final '/' character appended: otherwise all files with names starting with that substring will match, rather than just those in directory intended.

Meta Tag - Meta tags are used to provide structured data about data.

In early 2000s, search engines veered away from reliance on Meta tags, as many web sites used inappropriate keywords, or were keyword stuffing to obtain any and all traffic possible.

Some search engines, however, still take Meta tags into some consideration when delivering results. In recent years, search engines have become smarter, penalizing websites that are cheating (by repeating same keyword several times to get a boost in search ranking). Instead of going up rankings, these websites will go down in rankings or, on some search engines, will be kicked off of search engine completely.

Index a site - The act of crawling your site and gathering information.

How can robots.txt file and meta tag help you?

In robots.txt you can tell harmful 'web crawlers' to leave your web site alone, and give helpful hints to ones you want to crawl your site. Here is an example on how to disallow a web crawler to search your site:

Of all important decisions that go into a successful Pay Per Click Advertising program, most critical one is which keywords to target. Choosing right keywords will drive a continuous stream of qualified buyers to your site at affordable CPC's. Choosing wrong keywords will negate even most well planned Pay Per Click Advertising strategy.

Going Beyond The Obvious:

At first glance, choosing keywords for your Pay Per Click Advertising program seems easy. Anyone can come up with a list of obvious keywords related to their web site. The problem is, because keywords are obvious, all your competitors have come up with same list of words. This can lead to price inflation for these keywords on Pay Per Click Search Engines, making it difficult for anyone to profit from these keywords. The key to a successful PPC Advertising strategy is to identify targeted, hard to find, niche keywords that drive profitable traffic to your site.

Monetizing The "Keyword Tail"

The enormous number of queries that fall outside obvious keywords is known as "Keyword Tail". An advertiser's ability to mine "Keyword Tail" for profitable nuggets of Search terms is often difference between a successful Pay Per Click Advertising program, and one that loses money.

Examples of keywords that fall into "Keyword Tail" are singular, plural, and misspelled versions of keywords, and keyword terms related to obvious keywords for your site. For example, if you own a site that sells fishing supplies, you may come up with following list of keywords:

Obvious Keyword: Fishing