Your meta tags are pretty important for your on-site SEO. Sometimes you will notices a huge difference by editing your title a little, or maybe adding a few more keywords in your description. So I will go over the title tag, description tag, and keyword tag right now. Remember, I teach these things plus a TON of more information and tips n’ tricks at Whois SEO.
Important! Never write your title, description, or keywords for the search engines. Always write them for the users. Search engines are smarter than you think (its not 2000 anymore 
), they know when you are trying to trick them.
Meta Title
The key with this is to write it as mini sales letter for your site, with your keywords within it. If that makes sense? You want people to be able to search for the keyword you are optimizing for and to rank for it… but then to click on your site once you get on the first page. extreme webmaster was right with his comment on Go For 1st Ranking, The Rest Is Worthless. This is what he said:
Hmm… I agree that the best thing to own is the 1st place, but I wouldn’t agree on % of clicks and time spent.
Some 2nd or 3rd results may outweigh the 1st result, if the first one is poorly written. I have managed to do that for some of my websites.
That’s because some websites have much link juice, but really poorly written title and description meta tags.
Example: someone searches for “early spring flower care”
And you get “superbamazingflowers.com - your flowers, flower gifts…etc” as the first result (the title). And the description is also filled with keywords, instead of actually describing the page.
Now imagine the second result is “how to tend to your flowers in early spring” and the description “early spring flower care explained: an easy guide”.
Which one would you click on? Not everyone clicks automatically on the first result, there is a lot of people who actually read to find the best match for their search.
With that being said, quality AND 1st place in SERPs are the best thing to do.
Its true that if the meta tags are poorly written, the user skip right over your website and click on someone else. And if you do a good job writing your meta tags than a user might skip over your competitors and click on your website. So, when writing your title tag, remeber to make it a mini sales letter. Just look at my title “Evil SEO with Jon Waraas”… doesn’t that get you to wanna click on my website
Meta Description
I laugh when I look at websites without the meta description. This is pretty important, and a decent size on-site SEO step that you should never skip. Seems like the search engines are giving less and less weight to this tag every passing year. But its still important. Not only does it help with your on-site SEO, but it also is a mini sales letter for people to click on your website from the search engine page. You should optimize your description so that when people search for your keyword and see your description, they will want to click on your website and buy your shit.
Meta Keywords
Worthless. No reason to even waste your time adding these. Worthless. Worthless. And if anyone says they add value than think twice about the info there giving you
Example of a on-site SEO meta tag
These are just examples to get your brain going, all websites will have a different title and description.
Here is a content sites meta:
<title>What is $long-tail-keyword? Get the facts with $site</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Get answers and learn information about $long-tail-keyword. $site is a online information site about $short-tail-keyword” />
Product site:
<title>Buy $product here. Beat deals at $site</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Get $product at low costs. We have everything you need for $mainkeyword” />
Have fun, and remeber, you will learn a lot more SEO at Whois SEO
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Calling the description meta tag a mini sales letter is brilliant! Because that is what it precisely is. You have great associations!
As for the keywords meta tag, I wouldn’t completely agree with you. They may be worthless if you compare them to all the other onsite SEO factors, such as content (first and foremost), bolded words, titles, description and title meta tags. When put next to these, they look pretty worthless.
But I have heard from other SEO experts that they contribute to your onsite SEO in a minuscule way. It’s maybe 0.1% or even 0.01% of the overall onsite SEO. But even if it’s that small, why should anyone shove them aside? It takes from 30 seconds to 1 minute to write them.
I remember the commercial for some razors - they were showing a swimmer and a cycling racer. They showed their skin and said “Shave off 1/100th of a second”.
So by writing the keywords, you gain that 1/100th second advantage over other websites. And when it takes less then 1 minute to write those keywords, I think you should write them. Why not?
Especially when there are search engines like Yahoo! and MSN, not to speak of a myriad of others who are not as sophisticated as Google and will look at the keywords. Even if it’s that tiny 0.01%, I think it’s worth it. Because if you give your website all that you can, when you push with all your might, you know that you’ve given it the best, that you have invested yourself, and you can be satisfied and never have any regrets. And you’ll rank.
Great post. Keep on truckin’!
I try to write my meta tags like i write my adwords ads, Something really catchy with my keywords in it, and alot of punctuation like !’s and ?’s
I just realized that the code for the examples isnt worken, ill fix that now
I agree 100% with extreme webmaster, the meta keywords don’t matter too much, but they matter a little. Why not spend the time, 10 seconds, to write it and be done. It could help and there is no harm - unless you stuff it.
Jon, how do you know for sure that meta keywords tags are completely worthless? I know Google has said that they no longer read them, but we can’t go by that. It would be difficult to run a controlled experiment showing that they are worthless. You can find sites ranked highly that lack keyword tags, but you can also find sites ranked highly with poorly optimized title tags as well, sometimes for very competitive keywords.
Very interesting!
And i thought everything else matters.. not until i read this articles. Now i know why some doesnt really care about what’s in their meta keywords.. very interesting indeed! =)