Order of META tags? Keywords tag?

Is there a an official structure?

[Oaf357]

Is there any particular order in which meta tags should be in?

Also, is it even worthwhile to use keyword meta tags anymore?

[tedster]

At the recent Search Engine Strategies conference in Boston, there was one panel called "Meet the Crawlers" which had reps Google, Teoma, AskJeeves, AltaVista, WiseNut and Inktomi. Inktomi stated that they DO use the keywords tag - but no one else does currently.

I'm not aware of any order requirement, except to say I suggest keeping your use of meta tags minimal. I usually limit my pages to Description, Keywords -- and Robots, but only where a NOINDEX or NOFOLLOW is needed.

[Oaf357]

So Google doesn't use keywords at all? Did Inktomi say why they use them?

[tedster]

Well, no one was giving away the details of their algo, LOL. If I remember correctly, all that Ink said was "we do".

Common reasons for using the keywords meta would include alternate spellings. Alta used to encourage that in their webmaster info page. Interesting that they've now stopped using the tag completely. I guess it's pretty tough to generate relevant results for the user when part of your algo is based on an invisible element that's 100% available for manipulation.

So Google doesn't use keywords at all?

No, not at all. AFAIK, they never did.

[Oaf357]

So basically not using the tag at all won't really hurt.

Thanks for the help.

[tedster]

I use it as a handy place to keep notes on what I optimized for.

[heini]

Very good, Tedster, I like that.
I also find it useful to keep meta languages in, but that's mostly a concept interesting for multilingual sites, and sites using extended (to ascii) characters..