How important are Meta Tags for search engines, or just to increase the rate of customers to a site? I'm currently working for a design business, and I think they could benefit from more traffic.

There arn't 'any' meta tags I have found out in the html of the homepage. Do you people think that having a lot of keywords in this area could increase traffic? If so, please reply to this message.

I will also be willing to offer cash to people who are offering help.


Regards,
Geoff.

i think everyone could benefit from more traffic :D

meta tags certainly help people find what they're looking for, although i don't think having a "lot" of keywords is as effective as having just a few accurate keywords.

take a look at http://kali.xentrik.net/code/metatags.html

Having Meta Tags is only part of the solution. We have gotten many sites in the top 10 in Google, MSN, AOL, Yahoo etc..

It takes more than just good keyword placement. The search engines also look for your title tag, they look for size font you are using (currently H4 is very popular for search engines.) Adding comment tags <!-- keywords --> above paragraph with a 2-3 word explaination of the paragraph helps.

Most search engines look at the first 7 keywords and the first 45 words of text on your site along with your description and title.

Now comes the fun part Yahoo and Google look to the data only and not the meta tags info. :)

Make sure you use index/foward tags also.

There is a lot to it so read all you can or pay someone like us to do it. check out spider-food.net for the best in search engine info.


My 2 cents

Robert

Originally posted by Geoff_A
How important are Meta Tags for search enginesShort answer: not very important. As GWDGuy mentioned, some major search engines ignore them. None of them value them too highly. And improperly used they can even have a negative effect. If you do use a META KEYWORDS tag, be sure not to list any words that don't appear elsewhere in the page content.

The META DESCRIPTION tag is somewhat more useful than KEYWORDS in that some search engines and directories will use it as the text returned when your site matches a query; especially if the page has no other text (Flash or images-only, for example).

But as far as getting good rankings on search engines is concerned, meta tags are pretty far down the list of the things that you'll want to work on.