Some designers choose not to use the meta tag option at all. I believe this to be an unfortunate error. For me, the meta tag is just another way for me to help focus my site on what I want the search engine to focus on. The meta tag costs me no significant time, no money, and very little effort to include so why not include them?

The simple fact is that meta tags are not required. If you build a site, register that site with a search engine or two, the spiders will get around to crawling your site and, based on content alone, will index and list your site. If you design your site in this manner then you are at the mercy of the search engine rules for indexing. Some engines grab the first 250 characters of your site and base their indexing on that alone. Others look for site maps, while others index the entire site placing the most weight on the opening paragraph of your content. It makes sense, then, to carefully craft your first paragraph of content.

This is true whether you utilize meta tags or not but is especially true if you don’t. The meta tag, however, allows you to exert a large degree of control on how your site is indexed by search engines and, while the inclusion of meta tags does not guarantee that control, in many cases, especially with the larger and more popular search engines, it seems to work quite well.

Even if you choose not to include meta tags in general, it is critical that you include a title tag in the head section of your index page. The title tag is a specialized meta tag. It is the tag that places your site name in the tab above the page. While meta tags generally follow the following format: “<META name =”meta name” content=”content”</META>” the title is formed as follows: “<TITLE>Title</TITLE>”. The title is also the heading that is returned when a search engine listing is displayed. The title tag allows you to decide how your site will be identified to the rest of the world.

While the title is critical, other meta tags are still optional. As far as I am concerned, the keyword and description meta tags are, however, an absolute necessity. I often include a copyright tag, a robots tag, and a revisit tag as well. These optional tags either act as an additional copyright protection or they instruct robots how you want them to visit your site.

Meta tags are always found in the document head and never in the body sections of an HTML page. They are hidden from general view and do not interfere with the design of your page.