Meta Tags
As we've covered many times, the description meta tag is the most useful. (And, the NOODP tag is now useful for reasons that we discuss in this month's updates section.) All others are basically useless in terms of having any effect on search results or link descriptions. The point to remember is that the description meta tag provides your webpage's description on the search engine results page (SERP). Therefore it's important to use it to provide a compelling description that motivates people to click your link within the search results. This factor is far more important than any ranking boost that keywords placed within this meta tag may or may not provide. By the way, this is another topic that we covered in detail in our report How to get Google, Yahoo, and MSN to Title and Describe Your Webpages the way YOU want them to! And, as is the case with your title tag, every page on your site should have a unique meta description tag for the search engines to use as they describe your webpage's link. The only other meta tag that has any potential influence on rankings is the meta keywords tag—but it has little, if any, effect. In general, it can be entirely ignored even though Yahoo recommends the meta keywords tag in their webmaster guidelines. Here's what they say... Use a "keyword" meta-tag to list key words for the document. Use a distinct list of keywords that relate to the specific page on your site instead of using one broad set of keywords for every page. Source: Yahoo Ranking Guidelines The meta keywords tag is one of those page elements that's unlikely to help your pages much, if at all, but it's not going to hurt. If you have the time, there's no reason not to add a few of your page's most important keywords to your meta keywords tag, separated by commas. Include common misspellings as well. Just don't go overboard and repeat keywords multiple times (i.e., keyword stuffing) or it could backfire and get your page penalized. And be aware that your competition might fish around in your meta keywords tag to get a look at where you're focusing your optimization efforts.
