Meta elements generally are HTML elements used to provide structured metadata about a Web page. Such elements must be placed as tags in the head section of the HTML. Normally, Meta elements can be used to specify page description, keywords attributes. There are four valid attributes: content, http-equiv, name, and scheme. Of these, only content is a required attribute.
Early nineties, the meta information is used by most of the search engines to reach the right webpages. By late 1997, search engines realized that information stored in meta elements, especially the keywords attribute, was often unreliable and misleading. Most of these are used draw users into spam sites. Search engines began dropping support for metadata provided by the meta element in 1998, and by the early 2000s, most search engines had veered completely away from reliance on meta elements.
Unlike the keywords attribute, the description attribute is supported by most major search engines, like Yahoo and Bing, while Google will still use page contents to get the description.
So, from the search engine ranking point of view, these meta tags (esp keywords) are really useless.
Then, What are all the other areas that you can focus to improve your web site content which are SEO friendly? Here you go:
Your HTML Page title Think about right title which is matching the content of the page. Make sure you are not repeating keywords many times in the title so that Search engines detect your website as SPAM website:)
Image ALT Tags use alternative text (ALT tags)for all the images. If you have company Logo, make you sure you have the right description (different from the HTML title).
H1 tags When Search engines Detects text with HI tags, it understands, that is important text. You can consider use your proposed keywords as part of H1 tags.
Content Try to use your proposed keywords as part of the contents. Content is the top most priority for all the search engines. So, Prepare your content in such way you can fit your keywords correctly (of course naturally)
URL If you can form your webpage URL with your keywords, it will increase your SEO points. Try to avoid ids, numbers (most of the CMS will do) as part of the URL. if you have query string with number parameters, see if you can convert to meaningful keywords (using URL rewrite tools)
SiteMap Create a clean sitemap and submit via Google webmaster tools. This will tell the web crawler to search and index your webpages correctly.
