Why Are Meta Tags Important?

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Meta tags are important because they provide valuable information to browsers, search engines, and web surfers, about the content of your web pages and your site. There are many different meta tags, but the main ones you need to know about are:-

Title
Description
Keywords

Each of these three is very important.

Title
Many search engines give higher weighting to words contained in the title of your document. They also display the title to the internet surfer to help him decide whether this is the page they are looking for. Your title should contain a concise headline about the content of the page.

Description
Once again, most search engines look at the contents of the "description" tag, and allocate them more weight than the same words contained in the body of the document. They also display this field to the surfer, to help him decide whether to click your link or not.
Your description tag should expand on the title, and give a brief summary of its contents. You may only have about 3 seconds to convince the surfer to click this link!

Keywords
It's self explanatory that this tag is provided for you to list key words. Many people think that "meta tags" means "keywords", some web professionals overstress the importance of the keywords tag, other almost ignore it, and yet others abuse it by repetition, or by adding irrelevant words.
Used properly, and with a little imagination, it can be a powerful assistant in helping search engines to index your pages correctly, and match users wants with their results.
Examples of good use of keywords are:-

Two word, three word, and other short phrases.
Synonyms, alternative spellings, and common mis-spellings.
Foreign language equivalents, including English and American.
Words which place this particular page in the context of your overall web site.

Other Meta Tags
Other meta tags can be used to redirect surfers from obsolete pages to the updated version, stop search engines from indexing the particular page (for example an obsolete page), give information about the language used on the page (e.g. French, English, etc.), and other technical matters.