Forum Moderators: open
A good working definition of "meta-data" as applied to HTML pages is "that part of the contents of the <head> section of the page which describes the page (or technical aspects of the page)." It is only the "meta-keywords tag" which is deprecated. There are others, such as "revisit-after" that never had any effect, or had effect only on one or a few obscure directories or search sites.
Good page-related titles and descriptions, proper use of semantic markup (e.g. <h1>, <h2>, etc.), and unique, useful content on your pages, plus relevant incoming links from respected sites is 90% of the job. And here [webmasterworld.com] is most of the rest.
Jim
Otherwise, all that you accomplish by adding meta-keywords is pushing the 'real' content of your page down by so many characters, making it harder for the search engines to find the real content, and according to some accounts, devaluing it.
As of the year 2000, meta-keywords are dead. Use your important keywords naturally in the page title, description, and in the text in the body of your pages, including the visible on-page title (<h1> tag) and section headers.
I hope you followed the link in my post above, and continued to the pages that it links to as well. That post still stands as a good introduction to developing a successful site.
Jim
[edited by: jdMorgan at 9:36 pm (utc) on Nov. 7, 2006]
