When you are trying to optimize your website for top search engine rankings
, the importance of the meta tags on your webpages is going to vary depending on which search engine you are targeting as well as the changing value that the search engines place on these tags. Although meta tags are not the main factor search engines will use to rank your site, they should not be left out.
Despite what many SEO experts will say, many will argue the fact that creating meta tags for your site is a very important task of your SEO strategy. Meta tags are used to add information about your website for web browsers to read. This information is not viewed by the visitors of your website unless the visitor knows how to view your source code of the page from their web browser menu.
The meta description tag is the tag right below the title tag. This is supposed to be used as a way to give a brief summary of content on that page. The search engines will not scan the entire text in your meta description tag, just the first 200 to 250 characters. You will want to make sure that you include your keywords or keyword phrases in the first 200 characters of these tags to make sure that they are read.
The meta keyword tag is used to list a summary of the most important keywords on the page. If a search engine crawls this tag, they might match the keywords listed in this tag with the keyword in the content of the page. Be sure to add keywords in this tag that actually occur on the content of your page.
While search engines are always changing their algorithms on how they rank websites, you will always want to include the meta tags on each of the pages of your website. It is better to include them, than to leave them out. With the rate of how the search engines are always changing, these tags might receive more value in the future then their current value now. If you include them when you are creating your pages, you wont have to worry about updating your page at a later time to include them.