Last week Bing's Webmaster Center team posted a useful post on the differences between HTML and XHTML in terms of optimization and they also included some good 101 level tips on meta tag optimization, see below:

• The closer the word is to the start, the more heavily weighted it is as a keyword. This is true for the bot as well as the reader.
• Keep the title text between 5 and 65 characters in length
• For greatest efficiency and consistency, write titles using this syntax: keyword phrase, category, website title (or brand)
• Make the title text unique on every page
• Dont use any of the following special characters in title text: '"<>{}--()

Meta Description Tag

While search engines reserve the right to use a variety of inputs for filling out site description snippets in their SERPs, webmasters who provide unique, concise, compelling, and keyword-laden descriptions in their meta tags description attribute help guide the development of their websites SERP captions.

When creating the description text, remember the following:

• Create unique descriptions for each page, using keywords specific to that page
• Keep the description text between 25 and 150 characters in length
• Do not copy title tag text content as a description; this is a wasted opportunity to develop more keywords and adds no value
• Make the description text unique on every page

Meta Keyword Tag

The meta tags keyword attribute is not the page rank panacea it once was back in the prehistoric days of Internet search. It was abused far too much and lost most of its cachet. But theres no need to ignore the tag. Take advantage of all legitimate opportunities to score keyword credit, even when the payoff is relatively low.

When creating keyword text, remember the following:

• Choose words that may be secondary keyword terms (save the primary keywords for use in the title and meta description tags), and even include a few, commonly seen typographical errors of primary keywords, just for good measure
• Limit your keyword and key phrase text, separated by commas, to no more than 874 characters
• Dont repeat a keyword more than 4 times among the keywords and phrases in the list
  

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