Related to that, does it matter if the tags are upper or lower case? I've seen somewhere recently the suggestion that lower case is better. For example,
and

What sayest thou?

I couldnt see that it made any difference and I am pleased to see you using all caps for META.

Oops. The opening chevron gobbled up my text so let me try again, this time using square brackets. Please replace them with pointy ones as you read.

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For example, is [meta... better than [META...
and
is [title... better than [TITLE...

What sayest thou?

I doubt upper case vs lower case makes a difference.

I haven't heard anything about this in a while, but back 4-5 years ago there was a lot of talk about how Front Page placed the Title Tag after the description, and webmasters needed to make manual changes to correct it for SEO. I also remember was a bunch of comments in an email discussion list that Detlev Johnson ran proving thru testing that Title and Description Tag order had no impact. I don't suggest it doesn't matter, but I would be interested in some new testing results.

In my experience with SEO I find that the order of the tags or its case does not really matter, although it seems like the title tag should generally be the first one. Also, for code cleanliness it would help to remove unnecessary meta tags, like those which indicate which HTML/text editor was used.

Of course the order of META-tags does not matter at all. Search engines try to analyse a page based on relevance. The order of META-tags is not a relevance criteria.

Upper V Lower:
these days ur supposed to put html and xhtml tags in lowercase so there gose that argument.

Order:
do you realy think the search engin actualy cares which tag is were, it just takes them by there content type and enters them in its own order any way so do them as you like

I think it didn't matters. That which tags come first and which one on second from description and keyword tag.
Isn't so?

We didn't think it would make a difference but we tested anyway - no difference.

This is an old post but wanted to comment anyway. Since keyword tags are not read anymore anyway it doesn't really matter. But as a matter of procedure I think Description should come first.

Chris Estes needs to be corrected. There ARE still search engines that use the keyword tag. While they may not be as large as google, yahoo and MSN, they are still a means to drive traffic to your site and the keywords should remain JUST for that purpose. Please don't post things like that because some unsuspecting person may actually think you know what you are talking about and will leave them out. They have a purpose, so use them. Any traffic is good traffic.

While for Google or other major search engines it really doesn't make any difference how we order meta tags, for other ones is possible to be important this order. In the same idea, indeed any way to get ranked is important, so why to do not make use of these meta tags? On the other hand thinking that Google is giving the big amount of visitors is somehow just a loss of time to spend hours looking for kw, descriptions and other stuff like this.