As with the browser title importance – the META tags should also include keywords and/or phrases. The following SEO related META tags are ones you should include in your HEAD tags.

meta name=”Title” content=”…”
meta name=”Description” content=”…”
meta name=”Keywords” content=”…”
meta name=”ROBOTS” content=”INDEX,FOLLOW”

The meta title tag should really contain the same content as the browser title tag ().

The Description tag should be a brief description of the page – it is our chance to try to influence the description of the page for crawlers. Not all robots and crawlers support it and Google is reported to create its own description when displaying pages in its results listings.

The keywords tag is now mostly ignored by search engine crawlers as it has been abused in the past by webmasters trying to rank high on certain terms. Most search engines now analyse the page and determine the keywords from the most frequently used words and phrases – although they have checks for keyword density and abuse of keywords in text can result in ranking penalties. The Meta keywords tag is sometimes useful as a way to reinforce the terms you think a page is important for (this is for the few crawlers that support it). Mentioning ‘SEO solutions’ in the keywords tag and then having this term elsewhere in the page MIGHT help boost the page a bit higher for those words. Only a few keywords should be used and all separated by commas as above. Try to avoid having too many keywords though – this should be limited to less than 10 and ideally less. Avoid repeating the same terms.

The ROBOTS tag indicates to robots and crawlers that accept META directives that they should index this page and then follow any links off this page. Of course change this if you don’t want that page indexed or links followed.