In the beginning web sites were built by writing this HTML into a text editor and submitting the completed code to the web. Since that time more and more WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors have become available and all this coding is done in reverse. It is therefore my assumption that tens of thousands of web pages are on the Internet without their creators even knowing any HTML basics, let alone what a META Tag is, where it is placed or what it's purpose is.
Let's take a quick look at how search engines index your site. First of all this is all done mechanically. A robot goes to the web site and reads the source code (HTML). It then indexes the site using "Keywords." These are the words that the public uses to find information on the Web. You've used search engines in this way and most of the time end up with a lot of sites that are totally unrelated to your quest. Why? Because they either lack META tags or their tags have unrelated keywords stuffed into them. It tends to make your life difficult when there is information that you are trying to get.
The search engines robots will read the title tag first. The title tag is essential and if you use your WYSIWYG editor and it asks for a title and you call it index - for example - this is how your page will be listed on the search engine. Your title tag needs to have the name of your company and a few words that tell what the page is about. Note that search engines give more weight to the title of your page than to any other tag, especially if the text is repeated in the body of your page.
If there are no other META tags, the robot will then take the first words of text that follow. This could be disastrous, especially if you are utilizing frames and/or tables on your site. The first words that are indexed in a table for example are those located in the upper left cell (or column). Those
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