Back in the day, a website’s meta tags used to be the staple for achieving high rankings in the search engines. However, it was too widely abused as a means for stuffing pages with keywords to try to manipulate the search engine results. As a result the meta tags, mainly keyword and descriptions, have lost much of their significance for web site optimization purposes. This varies between the major search engines.

Google does not index the meta keywords and does not use them to factor for rankings. It does, however, index the description and often uses it in the search engine results pages. But the description plays little importance for SEO. The meta keywords and descriptions are still important to Yahoo and MSN.

As a rule of thumb, use meta keywords sparingly, keeping them as general as possible. Avoid using your most important keywords because it is easy for competitors to scrap your site to find them. Also, make sure that the keywords you do use are included in the body content of your site. You don’t want them to be off topic.

Take the time to write effective descriptions. They should support your title tags. When you leave out the meta descriptions, the search engines may pull content from your site that might not be very compelling to a user.

For control over your meta tags in Drupal, use the Nodewords module. To configure it, navigate to Administer > Content Management > Meta Tags. Here you can specify global keywords that will display on every page. It is not necessary to have these. Below, you have the option to include terms from your vocabulary lists. These will appear before the global keywords but after the page specific keywords.

Under Tags to show on edit form, select which tags you want to be able to manage on your content edit pages. You only need to check keyword and descriptions. This will be the same for tags to output in html head.

Remember, when it comes to meta tags, less is more.