Good afternoon one and all

Ok let me just start by saying that I am a relative newbie, not up to date at all and hoping to rectify both these flaws (heehee!) by starting afresh and building myself a brand spanking new and compliant website......hopefully!

The Question:
In relation to search engine rankings and descriptions and the like I am aware that it is recommended to use meta tags for keywords, description and such like.

With this in mind I was just wondering exactly what tags are best to use, and just how much data/information should be used to make it as SE friendly as possible.

I know that there are many possible tags available, but also understand that many of them are pointless or irrelevant, so as stated I would just like to know what the "Professionals" consider the best way to use meta tags.

Thanks a million in advance! (",)

David

You have copied / pasted a post from another site. The links referencing that site have been removed.

Take a look at this post, it outlines basic seo techniques
Basic SEO Techniques

There is also a section of this forum for seo/marketing.

Quick answer:
Less important than before, still important.

keywords, description are decently important, they also help with ad generation for google adsense

the robots meta tag with index, follow is important
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow"/>

This tells crawlers to index that page and follow all links on it (leads to discovery of new pages.

Meta tags are important but not as important as in the past. It is necessary to include meta tags and keywords so that when google does index your site, it is able to tell the user what your site is about.

If you did not use meta tags your page would be displayed on google in whatever way google wants to display it, rather than how you want it displayed. These days, meta tags are less important in terms os search engine ranking.

not true hitch. IE is moving to a meta tag driven standards mode. in the future because of the way IE is built they will slow down the version releases and update compliance via meta tags.

i actually use a meta to keep my site from flip flopping its mode based on content.

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" />

Yes the meta tags are very imp for search engines.

You'll want to make sure the "description" meta tag contains the appropriate key words and phrases that apply your website - and also "makes sense."

Google will USUALLY use this content to populate the short description with search results. However, Google can also pull the description from DMOZ so you want to make sure you're listed there as well.