Meta tags and key words/phrases

[tenaki]

HELP I am getting in a mess here, can you help

Metta tags: what ones do I need?

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" />
<meta name="classification" content="Recreational">
<meta name="description" content="My stuff">
<meta name="keywords" content="KEYWORDS">
<meta name="distribution" content="Global">
<meta name="rating" content="General">
<meta name="author" content="ME">
<meta http-equiv="reply-to" content="email">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language"content="English">

I seem to have a lot and for no reason it seems

Note there is no robots.txt as I am totally confused about that one

Keywords/phrases
People say keywords but when I look a lot of sites use phrases?

So is it words or phrases?

Andshould they be spaced with a comma, recently I have seen a lot of high ranking websites with no comma's seperating their keywords

Hope you can help

[crankydave]

The only one of any importance at all, IMO, is the description. Remember that this can be displayed as the search text so be sure and craft one that will get a potential visitors attention.

Yes, separate your keywords and keyphrases with a comma.

Dave

[crush123]

as crankydave wrote,
description is the important meta tag along with title tag for search engines.
robot tag helps if we dont want our site or any of its pages to get indexed etc..

keyword meta tag has lost its importance.
anyhow, you may use either keywords or phrases seperated by comma

[tenaki]

Thank you guys that was very handy.

Am I right in thinking then that keywords/phrases are of less importance than I have always thought?

[incrediblehelp]

If you use an internal search function the keyword tag can still be helpful.

[crankydave]

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

If you use an internal search function the keyword tag can still be helpful.

Good point. This also reinforces the need to craft them properly from the onset.

Dave