While Meta Tags are clearly important for the success of your web site, they are actually an optional addition. The purpose of a meta tag is to allow search engine crawlers to more accurately list and index your site thereby allowing you to tell the search engine what you want it to index. Most web designers will tell you that meta tags are another way to bring traffic to your site and help you rise to the top of the search engines organically.
Meta tags are not required. If you build a site and do some light marketing, eventually the search engines will get around to crawling your site and, based on content alone, will index and list your site. If you decide to design your site in this fashion then you are at the mercy of the search engine rules for indexing. Most search engines grab the first 250 characters of your site and base their indexing on that alone. Others search engines look for site maps, while others index the entire site placing emphasis on the opening paragraph of your content. Because of this, it’s critical that you strategically use keywords and phrases that are powerful in your first paragraph. This is true whether you utilize meta tags or not but is especially true if you don't.
The title is also the heading that is returned when a search engine listing is displayed. The title tag allows you to decide how your site will be identified to your browsers and the rest of the world.
While the title is critical, other meta tags are still optional. I highly recommend having the tags and keywords added during the design stages of your site as it can be quite costly to later go back and add them in.
Meta tags are always found in the document head and never in the body sections of an HTML page. They are hidden from general view and do not interfere with the design of your page.
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