g1smd - 9:27 pm on Jul 12, 2011 (gmt 0)

The character encoding should be first. At least one old browser had problems displaying special characters in the title if the encoding was defined later.

Next you need the title and meta description. I haven't use the meta keywords element for many years.

Next place your links to CSS files and then finally place any links to js files. There are solid reasons why links to js should be last. I'll see if I can find the article that talks about that.