Meta tags - better NOT to have?

[damon1212]

OK ok . . . the SEOMox report card told me it's actually better NOT to have meta tag keywords on my page, because my competitors can then look at my page to see what words I am trying to target . . .

That makes since, but is also painfully counter intuitive.  I thought I would just double check and make sure . ..  NO META TAGS KEYWORDS?

and if so . . .. what (if anything) should I have in the meta tags?

[AlanBleiweiss]

In 2011, true SEO professionals could care less what you put in your meta Keywords field, since that field has not been used as an SEO method in a long long time.  All they need do is look at your page Titles.  Or they can run a bot to scrape your page Titles, h1 tags, link URLs, internal and inbound link anchor text, image alt attributes, to generate a neat spreadsheet.  All automatically.

[EGOL]

I agree.  If any competitor is sniffin' your meta tags you probably don't have to worry about him. 

[MarieHaynes]

I don't use meta keywords simply because I don't think they have any value at all.

I do use meta descriptions though.  At first I didn't because Google usually does a good job at picking out a snippet that is appropriate to the user's search.

However, if you have stuff that gets shared on Facebook, Facebook uses the meta description as a description for the post when it gets shared.

[bemcapaz]

The only meta that I really care about is the Description. The others i let wordpress auto manage but im thinking in getting it out (the meta keyword) since it would be a hint to my competitors on wich keywords i have been optmizing for.