Even though the importance of meta tags have been brought into question, one fact is for certain. There is absolutely no harm in adding them, and better still optimizing them. Using meta tags the way they were intended to be used can only benefit your site, not punish it. Also, as I’ve mentioned in the introduction to this section, there are still many meta based search engines around, and while the overall searches conducted on these engines might be 5% at most, that still represents traffic you could be getting if you optimized your tags.

There are two essential tags.

Many search engines will display the description along with the page title in there SERPs. It’s a good idea to make sure your description accurately reflects the content on that page; the more accurate it can be while squeezing in your keywords in a logical, sensible manner, the better. If a visitor clicks on your link based on that description and finds that page to be informative, you’ve left a good impression, and may get a return visit, or better still a regular visitor. Keep the description reasonably short, concise, and accurate. No more than short paragraph is necessary.

Keywords listed in the meta keywords tag must also accurately reflect that pages content, and actually appear throughout that page, both in the actual content text, and the rest of the tags. Don’t repeat keywords with small variations, try to make them unique. Once again to lay down a barrage of keywords, this could get your penalized.

There are two other meta commonly used - Robots and Author. The robot tag is used to direct search engine spiders around your site, specifically if they should index a page or not. The author tag is used to indicate the author of the page.

While meta use is often maligned, don’t discount it altogether. It just represents another tool you can use to achieve your goal of Number #1