Meta Tags
Those who think that a properly designed set of meta tags will get a page top search engine placement would be wrong. Actually meta tags are needed, but they are one of the elements that make up a top ranking page. Meta tags alone are not a magic cure all for poor search engine placement.
There are many meta tags, but we will concentrate on the 3 most common and important ones. They are the Title, Description and Keywords.
Meta tags are always contained within the <head> and </head> tags at the top of your page. They look like this:
<html>
<head>
<title>your title here</title>
<meta name='description' content='description here'>
<meta name='keywords' content='keywords here'>
</head>
What you want to do is place your keywords and phrases between the <title> and </title> tags, and and between the quotation marks of the content atribute of both the 'description' and 'keywords' meta tags. For details, see appropriate pages.
Some experienced designers add other meta tags to enhance promotion efforts. For example you could add one called 'name' or 'designer' or 'subject' or 'anything' for that matter. Then place more of your keyword and phrases in the content attribute. However we will avoid using these for the purposes of keeping a complex subject simple. :)
Some HTML editing programs add meta tags to drive special features. For example the Microsoft FrontPage program automatically adds the following:
<meta http-equiv='Content-Type'
content='text/html; charset=windows-1252'>
<meta name='GENERATOR' content='Microsoft FrontPage 4.0'>
<meta name='ProgId' content='FrontPage.Editor.Document'>
These tags have a negative impact on page focus and should be removed.
Other FrontPage meta tags must be kept. For example if you are using Themes, one of the tags will refer to the Theme that you have selected, and won't work without it. The same goes if you are using Shared Borders.
JavaScript is often located within the <head> tags. By in large this is Ok. Just locate your JavaScript below your meta tags.
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