Should I use these Meta Tags or Remove it?

[Force7]

Hi,

I have a lot of older pages that I am cleaning up older pages, and I see that I have

<title>Actual Title</title>  (I understand the importance of this tag.)

(I have some text in this meta tag on a lot of pages, sometimes matching my title tag exactly but in some cases I treated it like a mini description.

Should I remove the   on my pages, or keep it and make sure it is the exact as the main Title Tag.

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Question about meta tag #2.  I have heard rumors that the keywords tag should be removed.

example:

Thanks in advance!

Force7

[donford]

META Title Vs Title

Title tag is the most important hands down. Now, does having a META Title Tag help or hurt??? I've heard a mixed bag of answers on that. I personally have never seen any benefit from using them. Research in the matter may also frustrate you as many people simply refer to the title tag as the meta title tag which isn't true.

Meta Keywords Tag
Meta Keywords tags are ignored completely by Google. Some search engines may give them some benefit but it has been widely known that meta keyword tags are just a place for keyword spam and most search engines have moved away from even acknowledging there content.

[Force7]

I was trying to be very specific in my question in case someone new to SEO happened to read this and confuse the two.

[KyleChamp]

The Meta Keyword tag offer 0 benefit when comes to SEO. I would remove your keywords from there so competitors cant analyze your meta keyword tag and see what keywords your trying to rank for.

[TakeshiYoung]

Have to disagree here.  First of all, meta tags ARE used by a number of smaller search engines, including Bing, which uses them when they have no other information available about a site.

Also, beyond search, many directories and social bookmarking sites auto-pull meta tags to generate content for their pages.  If you use either of these linkbuilding tactics (which can be beneficial in moderation) having the meta tags will save you time.

I also don't buy the argument that meta tags will help your competitors.  Any competitor worth there salt will be able to figure out what your keywords are-- if it's obvious to the search engines, it's going to be obvious for them too.  So having your keywords in a meta tag isn't going to hurt you.