Want top search engine rankings? Just add meta tags and your website will magically rise to the top, right? Wrong. Meta tags are one piece in a large algorithmic puzzle that major search engines look at when deciding which results are relevant to show users who have typed in a search query.

While there is still some debate about which meta tags remain useful and important to search engines, meta tags definitely aren’t a magic solution to gaining rankings in Google, Bing, Yahoo, or elsewhere – so let’s kill that myth right at the outset. However, meta tags help tell search engines and users what your site is about, and when meta tags are implemented incorrectly, the negative impact can be substantial and heartbreaking.

Let’s look at what meta tags are, what meta tags matter, and how to avoid mistakes when implementing meta tags on your website.

What Are Meta Tags?

HTML meta tags are officially page data tags that lie between the open and closing head tags in the HTML code of a document.

The text in these tags is not displayed, but parsable and tells the browsers (or other web services) specific information about the page. Simply, it “explains” the page so a browser can understand it.

Here’s a code example of meta tags:

head
title Not a Meta Tag, but required anyway/title
meta name=”description” content=”Awesome Description Here” /
meta http-equiv=”content-type” content=”text/html;charset=UTF-8″ /
/head

For more on the history of meta tags, see our post “Death of a Meta Tag”.

The Title Tag

Although the title tag appears in the head block of the page, it isn’t actually a meta tag. What’s the difference? The title tag is a required page “element” according to the W3C. Meta tags are optional page

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Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2067564/How-To-Use-HTML-Meta-Tags