How many meta tags are appropriate?

[scanlin]

How many meta tags are appropriate? There is a page that ranks above me that has many more than I do. It has (I have removed the content of each to give a description of the type of content):

I only use meta tags for keywords and description, robots. Should I have more?

Thanks.

[DavidKauzlaric]

Depends on what you are wanting to do.

First, get rid of META KEYWORDS, it is not used anymore.

Second, robots and description are plenty. Ranking factors are centered around title tag, backlinks, and a little of on-page.

I'd work on your links to move up the ladder!

[monicawright]

Hi there,

Honestly, the ones to focus on include the title tag, the meta description, and the robots. If you have a non-English language site, then consider the meta content language and meta language tags. The keyword tag does nothing for rankings. In fact, the meta description impacts rankings very little as well, but assists in providing a marketing message in your search result that can impact a click through to your site. The title tag is probably the most significant on-page ranking factor, so pay special attention to how those are executed sitewide.

Here is a good review in Webmaster Central : http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=79812

Hope this helps!

[scanlin]

Thanks, Monica. That's what I thought. Just wanted to confirm. I've got the title tag, meta description and robots down, so i'll focus on external links more. Thanks again.

[scanlin]

Thanks, David. I thought I had read that meta keywords were still used by Yahoo or Bing (definitely not Google). Is that not true? Does it harm anything to have the meta keywords if I just leave them as-is (since I already have them), or should I pro-actively go remove them?