Contrary to what many web designers make out, meta tags are usualy ignored or
given very low priority by most search engines and directories. Of the major
search engines only Altavista, Yahoo,Infoseek and Hotbot seem to rank your pages based on meta tags
Most search engines including the above, give the highest priority to the TITLE
and text at the top of the page. Some Engines do not give special priority to
META tags but consider them to be ordinary text. However excite claims to
ignore meta tags completely do to widespread abuse.
The description tag
< META NAME="description" CONTENT="...." >
With engines that honour meta tags, the description
or a portion
of it is displayed as the page's summery. If the first few lines of
your page provides a good summery this tag need not be used
The length of the tag
Should be kept as short as possible. Many engines ingnore the
tail of the tag if it is too long. Altavista claims to index upto
1024 bytes, but I have yet to see a description that long in my
searches.
Generaly it's a good idea to keep the descriptionto less
than 200 bytes
The keywordstag
< META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="....">
Is used to provide additional keywords for searches, keywords are
separated by ','.
The Length of the tag
Many engines ignore the tail of the tag if it is too long. Altavista
indexes upto 1024 characters, but with other engines it is low as
200 - 250
It is a good idea not to use spaces between the
keywords to keep the size of the tag to a minimum
Add synonyms to the keywords tag
For example if your page is about hard disk drives, ad the keywords
hard drives,hard disks,hard disk drives,fixed disks,fdisks.
Avoid repeatition
Some engines may consider repeated keywords as spam and will penalise you
by not including your page in the index. At present several engines
have set this restriction to 7 repeated keywords. However these engines
have now removed this information from the help pages. And it is
possible that the repeat value may have been set even lower.
