Therefor it is important that the title should appear beforet the meta tags. Some engines that does not not give recognise meta tags consider the keywords to be ordinary text, but will not dispaly them. However excite claims to ignore meta tags completely do to widespread abuse. Engines that honour the description tag are far more common than those that honour the keywords tag. If the first few lines of your page provides a good summery this tag need not be used The length of the tag Should be kept as short as possible.
Many engines ingnore the tail of the tag if it is too long.
Altavista claims to index upto 1024 bytes, but I have yet to see a description that long in my searches. It's a good idea to keep the description to less than 200 bytes. Is used to provide a list of comma delimited keywords for the benifit of search engines. Many engines ignore the tail of the tag if it is too long. Altavista indexes upto 1024 characters, but with other engines it is low as 200 - 250 Eliminating between two keywords helps to keep the size of the tag to a minimum Add synonyms to the keywords tag.