Meta Tags - Use it or not

google penalises you if you do not have title and description as metatags

Title Tag is VERY important. Include the keyword meta tag but don't stress too much about it.

It's far better to concentrate on the title and keywords in the page content.

Include a description meta tag too as this is often combined with page content to generate snippets.

A very interesting report about the most important Google SEO factors can be read here...

http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

Meta tags are useful and part of on-page optimization. All robots first read the meta tags of any page.

I think the best thing is to use meta tags.

My reasoning behind this is that

1) regardless of wheter you put your meta tags - people wil stil find out wat keywords you are targeting by looking at your keyword density ...

2) some search engines use it... it might also be used a secondary classification factor for some searche engines...

3) meta tags are simple - you only need about 5-10 keywords on a page...

... you will loose out on a bit of traffic from smaller SE's ...

... main thing concentrate on title, headings, content and keywords ...

There's no need to place keywords in a keyword meta tag, google, msn, yahoo doesn't use that to determine where you are going to rank, nor does it use it to find out what your page is about.

A meta description tag is ok, although I have found it to be fussy at times.

one of the main rules is to ensure that the first 25 words contain your keywords in and the last 25 words, and scatter your keywords throughout each paragraph just as if it were another meta description tag.

choosing to avoid the description meta tag can prove helpful providing the page is SE friendly, end result is you will find more traffic.

Hope this helps.

All the best

Loz

don't ignore meta tags coz, meta tag is a most important factor of seo.

complete nonsense, sorry, but you will find you will rank higher with no keyword meta tag than you would having one on your site.

google DOES NOT use the meta keyword tag to determine where you will rank. It hasn't done for many years now because people were spamming all sorts of keywords in this tag to get high rankings.

hi,
According to me using a meta tag is good it make spiders jobs easier.

Use Meta Description, it will be useful and act as a more content where you can include your targeted keywords. Google will use it and show it in the search results.

Meta tags are very helpful not only to spiders but on the visitors as well especially the title..

You can add an alt tag on the image to make it readable by spiders.

its effective on my part after adding tags to all my images and in the blog itself

The Meta Tags are important read this article

http://www.tasameem.net/store/free-traffic-tips.html

Anyway there is no bad effect in your site if you place a meta-tags...beside it helps the spider do his job in your site...So better have it than nothing...

sorry, not true, try creating a ror.xml file and placing the relevent code in the header tag so the search engines can find your pages easier than it would with a html site map.