The META tag

The meta tag is now a virtually dead part of search engine optimization.

The Meta description tag is located in the website's HTML code before the BODY part and its content is sometimes displayed in the results page of engines. The description tag looks similar to this code:

the following line with in brackets like <>

meta name="description" content="Brief description of the contents of the page"

It used to be that search engines would crawl a website and record the description from it and compare it with the keywords (the words with maximum density in the page content).Now websites with maximum match of keywords from the META tag and the body of the page were given a higher ranking in search results.All this before Google jumped in to the web searching arena.Giving rise to search engine optimization.After Google's entry things completely changed.Google chose to completely ignore the META tag and instead go for the content on the page.This eliminated the risk of websites getting to the top places of search results by manipulating the meta tag.

So why the META TAG?

The answer is simply because even though major search engines like google and yahoo dont use the meta tag, there are many search engines out there which do.and because making the meta tag hardly takes a minutes! So do your Search Engine Optimization.