There are three tags in the head of a web page you should be concerned about when optimizing the page, the title tag, the description meta tag and the keyword meta tag. The head of a page does two things, provides search engine spiders information about the page and contains functional information for the page. This article will focus on the tags in the head that provide information to search engines.
The title tag is the most important tag in the head of a web page. The title of a page is an ideal place for keywords because a search engine spider determines that the title should contain information on what the document is about. As a result, the search engine will assign more “weight” for calculating relevancy to words in the title than words found in other sections of the page. The title tag may also be viewable by users in the search results as the title of a page. So, words used in the title tag should make sense as the title of the document and not just a list of keywords. For more on the title tag, read the SEO FAQ.
The description meta tag is used to illustrate what the page is about. Search engines may also use this tag for more information about a page. It is debatable whether or not search engines place greater weight on words found in the description, but that discussion is beyond the scope of this article. For now, let’s suffice to say that they do index the tag and use it to help determine what the page is about. That should be enough to know that keywords should be placed here. Users may also read the description as it is sometimes used in search results underneath a document title to tell readers what the page is about. The words used here should also make sense and actually describe the page and not just contain a list of keywords.
The keywords meta tag is the last tag in the head that should be considered when optimizing a web page. The purpose of the keyword meta tag is to contain a list of keywords used in the context of the page. When search engines first came into existence, they heavily relied on this tag to assign relevancy to documents based on the user’s query. Not anymore. Once webmasters figured this out, they used this tag to manipulate a page’s ranking in the search results usually giving it a higher position in the search results than it deserved. Due to this practice, it is questionable that search engines look at this tag anymore. Even so, it may help you gain an advantage against a competitor so it is still worth using. The keyword meta tag contains a list of words separated by a space or a comma so it is a good place to add variations of your keywords, including misspellings, plurals, combinations, etc.
The head section of your web page contains tags important for SEO. The title tag is the most important of these tags and special attention must be paid to it when optimizing your pages. Meta tags may not be important as they used to be, but they can still be read by search engines and used with your web pages.
