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When I comes to the page header and the importance of each part regarding SEO there are a lot of opinions. Here, we will look at each of the tags that make up a page header and how it may affect your SEO efforts.
If we look back at our Example Page and everything that is above the <body> tag is part of the page headers. What we will be looking at are the Title and Meta tags.
The Title tag is by far the most important tag on your whole page. How many times do you go to a website and see something like index presented as the page title? I bet it is quite a few.
The Title is the first real text that is seen when a SE spider crawls your site. It is an often neglected mistake to not make use of the Title. How you use the title is important.
Real world example: A site I created a long time ago was not being found in any of the Search Engines. By simply changing the Title on all the pages the site was suddenly on the front pages in the SERPs.
There is a lot of controversy over the value of Meta tags these days. In the very early days of Search Engines they were used. As soon as webmasters realised, they became spam for Search Engines.
While most Search Engines these days place little value on meta tags, they probably still place some (very small) value on them. So, for the sake of 1-2 minutes, there is no harm in having them there. The meta keywords and meta description are the 2 main tags that you should spend a couple of minutes on.
Meta Keywords should be a comma seperated list of between 3 ad 6 keywords/key phrases for your page. Adding more will start looking like you are spamming the SE's and potentially be a negative.
Meta Description Should be 1 or 2 sentences that clearly describe the purpose of the particular webpage. I have found a very useful reason to add a meta description to all of my web pages. When submitting your site to directories, some of them are able to grab this description from your site - which means it is quicker for you to do the submission. More about this will follow in the Site Promotion articles.
Don't spend a lot of time, on the meta tags, but on the same token, don't dismiss them out of hand.