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META tags are hidden code read only by search engine webcrawlers (also called spiders). They live within the HEAD section of a web page. There are actually 2 very important META tags you need to worry about: description and keywords.
1. description
2. keywords
Sequencing of these tags may be extremely important. I say “may” because SEO is mostly hypothesis due to the changing algorithms of the search engines. Even though the W3C states that tag attributes do not have to be in any particular sequence, I’ve noticed a significant difference when I have the tags and attributes in the order described here. The only deviation from the list above is that the Title tag should come before the META description.

The description META tag is the text that will be displayed under your title on the results page. See the OC Internet Advertising example above. There’s also a lot of controversy about the number of characters you should have in this tag. I’ve seen sites with a paragraph in their description listed in the top results, so I don’t think the number of characters here plays any kind of role with the search engines.

<meta name=”description” content=”your_keywords_here followed by a statement about your product service or organization.” />

The last important META tag is the keywords META tag, which some time ago lost a lot of points in Google’s search engine algorithm. Along with being valuable to this top 10 SEO tips list, this tag is still important to many other search engines and should not be ignored. Based on my experience with this tag, you can have approximately 800 characters in this tag (including spaces).

There are still some minor “stone age” search engines around that uses them.

The main reasons why they have been ceased to work are mostly from these factors:

* Most webmasters tried to fool the search engines with meta tags unrelated to their content and services.
* With improved FTS (full text search) tool kits from verity and many other companies, search engines can index your web pages and know the theme of your web page. With such advanced APIs, search engines like google can easily decide, what your website is about and what your website offers.

Some of the basic features of FTS API are that they can filter out text of your webpage and get important statistics such as:

1. How many times a word gets repeated
2. How far each repeated words are from each other
3. How many times a particular word gets repeated in a particular sentence
4. How far a word ‘Online’ appears from words like ‘Party’, ‘invitations’ to
see if that sentence makes any sense.
5. They can easily figure out, if you are doing keyword dumping.

So with such API’s the webmaster should concentrate on the content/layout and not put the meta tags as a main concern.

However it has been tested that the meta keyword tag still has a minor influence on the rankings and the meta description tag should be used as it is some times shown in the SERPs (search engine result pages).

To require that an entire phrase be found in a search,enter quotes (” “) around the terms. For example, “giants baseball” returns listings where the words “giants” and “baseball” appear together and in that order, either in the title, the URL of the Web site, the description, the keywords, or the document. If no sites are found that contain both terms, sites that contain either term will be displayed.

The Page Description is a short blurb or summary of your web page found in the metadata. Google often uses the first 20-25 words of this description below your site name in search results. As with the Page Title, Google will bold the words that match the user’s search terms.

META tags are hidden code of information in the head area of your web pages and is used to communicate with search engine spiders/crawlers. The most important META tags you need to utilize in your webpages are:

1. Description
2. Keywords
3. Robots

I personally don’t believe that sequencing of these tags in certain order is that important. Even though I see many websites put title tag after description and keywords tags lately but there is no proof that it is better for SEO.

Optimization of Description Meta tags

The effective META description tag consists of 25 to 30 words or less but using no more than 160 to 180 characters total (including spaces) or some Search Engines would not consider it Search Engine Friendly.
Read more and see meta tags examples in this Meta tags article.

Optimization of Keywords Meta tags

The meta keyword tag is also sometimes useful as a way to help your page come up for synonyms or unusual words that don’t appear on the page itself but don’t fret too much over your Keywords Meta tag, instead utilize keywords and keyword phrases from your Title Tag element, Description Meta Tag, heading tag and first one or two paragraphs of visible content. Optimal Keyword Meta Tag has 15 to 20 words max. SEO Tip: Don’t repeat your keywords more than 3 times or search engine will consider it as spam of their search results and don’t include keywords that are not in the main content section of your page.
(Read more and see keywords tag examples in this Meta tags article.)

Robots Meta tag will let search engine know if you want a particular page to be or NOT be indexed or to follow or not to follow links on given page. (Read more and see robots tag examples in this Robots txt article.)

You can display your HTML link description in the status bar of your browser. When the mouse is placed over a link, the text link description will be viewed in the status bar.

<A HREF=”http://www.blog.tryangled.com” onmouseover=”window.status=’Your text description’; return true” onmouseout=”window.status=”;return true”>Your linked text</a>

Search engines come in two varieties, human-edited and spider indexed. The two major human-edited search engines (or directories as they are properly called) are the Open Directory Project (dmoz.org) and Yahoo. Search engine optimization is lost on the human-edited directories. Because humans will write your title and description for your site when they place it in their directories, using both objective and subjective methods, you have no control in the SEO-world over how your website will rank in these directories.

In both DMOZ and Yahoo, you can suggest a title and description, but most often your words will be rewritten by an editor and placed in their directories according to criteria of which you will not be privy to knowing. One of the big differences between DMOZ and Yahoo is that DMOZ is free and Yahoo is a paid inclusion. With both search directories there is the possibility of not being included, but as stated before DMOZ is free and with Yahoo, if you are not included, no refund will be given.

The only types of search engine in which you have some control are the search engines, which use spiders (sometimes called robots) to read, index and rank your site. The robots (and this is plural because some search engines like Google have several) are basically software applications that travel the Internet by following links and finding websites to read and add to their databases. These robots will travel to your website if you submit your site directly to them (hand-submit) or indirectly submit (through another software submission service or application) or fail to submit (they will follow incoming links to your sites also).

Once the robot finds your site and indexes it, it will move along to other sites from your outbound links. When you site is indexed, then another process takes place and this is the process of determining your ranking for specific keyword or key-phrase searches performed upon the search engine. All of the major search engines that use robots to index websites also use complicated algorithms for determining the page rank of your site. The search engine algorithm software looks at the title and description of the website along with keyword density and prominence to name a few to see which keyword or phrase your site is optimized for (if any). Certain weight is given for each of these components and the page is ranked accordingly.

The advantages of the spider-driven search engines over the directories are that first, search engine robots will continue to index your site on a regular basis whereas the directories basically will stick with the same title and description for the life of the website. Second, a webmaster or SEO professional has control over the optimization process in relation to the search engines, whereas in the directories, optimization is mostly irrelevant. Third, the volume (and popularity) of people using the search engines far outweighs the volume using the search directories. This means that yes, the major search directories are important places to submit your website to, but the major search engines are an absolute necessity.

Search engine optimization has been a hot topic for a last couple of years. With changing algorithms, search engines and directories swapping technologies and services and a general growth (or sense of survival), much has changed in search engine optimization technique. In the early days, spamming your own website with endless strings of keywords with the same color as the background is gone.

Search engine optimization then evolved into a dependence solely upon the content of the metatags regardless of what the rest of the rest of the site was about. Spamming the title and description tags with huge strings of keywords was enough to get top placement in many search engines (SE’s).

Now, however, search engine optimization has come to a place of making the metatag content match the text on the rest of the web page. Throw in link popularity and relevancy and you now have the contemporary formula for top rankings.

In contemporary search engine optimization technique, the title tag is probably the most important metatag on the website. The website’s primary keyword / keyphrase needs to be in the title tag. The description tag and other hidden metatags also are beneficial when they are keyword rich.

Search engine optimization, now also features the creation of keyword-rich and hopefully content rich text for the body of the web page. The keyword-rich text is for the SE’s and the content is for the visitors. Both audiences must be kept in mind when writing this text.

The last element in search engine optimization is the creation of incoming links that are relevant to the main subject of the website. One way to accomplish receiving incoming links is to trade links with another site (reciprocal linking). Another way is to pay another relevant website a monthly advertising fee in order to display a text or graphical link to your site.

Search engine optimization is something that can be accomplished through education, through an SEO company or through software that will create keyword-rich pages semi-automatically.

The educational part of search engine optimization can be attained by reading everything on the Internet focused on this subject. Going with a search engine optimization company will work for others who don’t have the time or inclination to self-educate or who want to get started right away. Software will work for others, though it is generally not as effective as the other two methods since search engine optimization is as much an art as it is a science.

A complete guide to search engine optimization would be book-length, and would be out of date as soon as it was published, but here are several tips for building a website with search engine optimization in mind:

1. Every page on your site must have a unique title tag, meta keywords tag, and meta description tag.

2. Follow W3C recommendations for HTML document structure. Begin the body copy of your page with your keyword phrase, and repeat it as needed as the theme of the page throughout your copy. Feature your keyword phrase prominently by including it in headers and making it bold or italics.

3. Use text navigation on your site, and use the keyword phrases you have selected as the links. If you cannot use text navigation, include a footer on every page using text links.

4. Build a text site map, and link to it from every page of your site.

5. Organize your navigation according to the importance of your keyword phrases. If you break your site into many pages, link to the most important pages from every page of your site, and link to the other pages from section header pages and the site map.

6. Establish your site by submitting to the major directories, The Open Directory and the Yahoo! Directory, then build your link popularity by submitting to web directories, search engines, and requesting links from related websites.

7. Be patient. A search engine optimization project can take quite some time to work.

For Google’s suggestions on search engine optimization, see Google Information for Webmasters - Webmaster Guidelines.

Some search engines are now indexing Web documents by the meta tags in the documents’ HTML (at the beginning of the document in the so-called “head” tag). What this means is that the Web page author can have some influence over which keywords are used to index the document, and even in the description of the document that appears when it comes up as a search engine hit.

This is obviously very important if you are trying to draw people to your website based on how your site ranks in search engines hit lists.

There is no perfect way to ensure that you’ll receive a high ranking.  Even if you do get a great ranking, there’s no assurance that you’ll keep it for long.  For example, at one period a page from the Spider’s Apprentice was the number- one-ranked result on Altavista for the phrase “how search engines work.”   A few months later, however, it had dropped lower in the listings.

There is a lot of conflicting information out there on meta-tagging.  If you’re confused it may be because different search engines look at meta tags in different ways.  Some rely heavily on meta tags, others don’t use them at all.  The general opinion seems to be that meta tags are less useful than they were a few years ago, largely because of the high rate of spamdexing (web authors using false and misleading keywords in the meta tags).

Note:  Google, currently the most popular search engine, does not index the keyword metatags.  Be aware of this is you are optimizing your webpages for the Google engine.

It seems to be generally agreed that the “title” and the “description” meta tags are important to write effectively, since several major search engines use them in their indices.   Use relevant keywords in your title, and vary the titles on the different pages that make up your website, in order to target as many keywords as possible.  As for the “description” meta tag, some search engines will use it as their short summary of your url, so make sure your description is one that will entice surfers to your site.

Note:  The “description” meta tag is generally held to be the most valuable, and the most likely to be indexed, so pay special attention to this one.

In the keyword tag, list a few synonyms for keywords, or foreign translations of keywords (if you anticipate traffic from foreign surfers).  Make sure the keywords refer to, or are directly related to, the subject or material on the page.  Do NOT use false or misleading keywords in an attempt to gain a higher ranking for your pages.

The “keyword” meta tag has been abused by some webmasters.  For example, a recent ploy has been to put such words “sex” or “mp3″ into keyword meta tags, in hopes of luring searchers to one’s website by using popular keywords.

The search engines are aware of such deceptive tactics, and have devised various methods to circumvent them, so be careful.  Use keywords that are appropriate to your subject, and make sure they appear in the top paragraphs of actual text on your webpage.  Many search engine algorithms score the words that appear towards the top of your document more highly than the words that appear towards the bottom.  Words that appear in HTML header tags (H1, H2, H3, etc) are also given more weight by some search engines.  It sometimes helps to give your page a file name that makes use of one of your prime keywords, and to include keywords in the “alt” image tags.

One thing you should not do is use some other company’s trademarks in your meta tags.  Some website owners have been sued for  trademark violations because they’ve used other company names in the meta tags.  I have, in fact, testified as an expert witness in such cases.  You do not want the expense of being sued!

Remember that all the major search engines have slightly different policies.  If you’re designing a website and meta-tagging your documents, we recommend that you take the time to check out what the major search engines say in their help files about how they each use meta tags.  You might want to optimize your meta tags for the search engines you believe are sending the most traffic to your site.