Meta-tags provide a mechanism for supplying information about a page without affecting its appearance.
There are many types of meta-tag but it's the 'description' and 'keywords' tags which are important for search engines.
These are the two tags used to summarize what your site is about (description) and what keywords are relevant to search
queries. Most of the major search engines index meta-tags, although what weight they give them varies from engine to
engine.Meta-tags should be placed within the 'head' tags of your web page and should have the following format:
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="Everything you wanted to know about subatomic physics.">
<META NAME ="keywords" CONTENT="subatomic, physics, lepton, hadron, boson, quark, particle, accelerator">
These tags are important because they offer a means of supplying search engine spiders with relevant keywords when, for one
reason or another, they don't appear elsewhere on a page. For example, if the home page to your web site contains a
graphical link and no plain text then meta-tags will be the only place where the spider will find any meaningful
text.
They are also useful because they give you some control over how your page will be displayed in search engine
listings. The content of the description meta-tag will be displayed as the description of the page. Without the
description meta-tag the search engine will display the first few lines of text that the spider found on your page,
and this can often be inappropriate.
Some search engines may include meta-tags in their relevancy algorithms, giving
a boost to pages which contain them. However, as useful as meta-tags are, don't assume they guarantee a top-ten listing.
That still depends mainly on the overall design of your web page, and how well you've chosen your keywords.
