Meta tags were once the all important bits of information that are invisible to your page's human visitors but sit high in the code of your page, between the head and /head HTML tags. Many years ago these tags had a great bearing on your page's rankings but their importance has gradually given way to other factors, in particular page content and PageRank. Google doesn't seem to take notice of them any more at all, with exception perhaps of the title tag which technically at least isn't really a meta tag anyway. Yahoo used to place much importance on meta tags but recently that has begun to change as well. It seems that meta tags really only have influence on a page's rankings in smaller Search Engines. In a number of Search Engines, the content of the tags will influence also how the page will be described in the search results pages. Meta tags optimization is easy and still worth doing because of this.

The title

The title tag remains by far the most important one because it has several functions. Firstly, these are the words that will appear in the top line (title line) of the Internet browser when the page is viewed. Secondly, the content of the title tag is also used as the description of the page when a viewer decided to bookmark it. Thirdly, to some Search Engines (and Google is among them), the title is an important indicator of the page's actual content. Include the main keyphrase in your title, in a natural sounding way.

The title tag for this page is simply: Meta Tags Optimisation

The description

This tag is intended to give a short description (a synopsis if you like) of the page's content. Some Search Engines use part of it (usually the first 20 or 30 characters) in the listing of your page when it appears in search results.

The description tag of this page is: meta name="description" content="Guide to Meta Tags Optimisation"

The keywords

Most Search Engines do actually index the content of this tag. Don't be tempted to select keyphrases for which the page content hasn't been optimised: the tag isn't influential enough in itself and should only be used to reinforce or underline the importance of the main keyword(s).

We've simply used: meta name="keywords" content="meta tags optimisation"

The title, description and keywords are generally recognised as the most influential tags of the entire set. Below are included some meta tags which should be considered optional.

The rating

A Web page can be given a rating that reflect suitability for viewing by children, on scale that incudes: genral, mature, restricted and 14 years.

For example: meta name="rating" content="general"

The author

Indicate the author of the page by: meta name="author" content="T.H.E. Author"

Copyright information

meta name="copyright" content="2005, YourDomain.com"

Robots

The robots tag tells Search Engine robots whether to index the page and any pages it links to or not. For example, if given pages contains nothing but affiliate links, you may want the page itself indexed, without the links being followed. So the tag can take on these values:

Index index the page (this is the default vaue and doesn't need to be specified)

Noindex request not to index the page

Nofollow request not to index any linked pages

In meta tags optimization the three most important aspects are the Title, Description and Keywords tags.