Meta tags are no longer the most important factor that search engines use when ranking websites, however they still cannot be ignored. Search engines are always changing their algorithms for ranking sites. Sometimes they place a large importance on meta tags and sometimes they don’t. So if you are debating whether or not to include meta tags on your page, just do it. They cannot hurt you and can only help. Currently, it seems like Yahoo and MSN value the meta tags more so than Google.

Meta tags go in between the <head> and </head> tags on your site. The two important ones that your should pay attention to are the description and keyword tags. Continue reading below for a more detailed explanation of these two tags.

Meta description tag - Should be a short and concise summary of your page’s content. Search engines will often times show this description on their search engine results page, so it would be a good idea to try and capture the visitor. Try to limit this tag to around 170 characters… anything more might be ignored by search engines.

Incase you don’t know the meta description tag syntax, look below:

Meta keyword tag - When writing keywords, include only the words that appear in the text of your page. This tag’s purpose is to provide a short list of the most relevant keywords for each page. Try to limit this list to 10-15 keywords… if you have anymore keywords, the search engines might view your site as “spammy” and penalize you.
If you don’t know the meta keyword syntax, it’s actually the same as the meta description tag syntax… the only difference is you need to replace “description” with “keywords”