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If it's for design only, why not use a div with a defined height and set to scroll? Then you get full seo benefits as well.

The short answer is, it does not matter. The recommendation I would make is to use what some people refer to as "technology-proof" URLs. Drop the file extension. Why? it looks cleaner and nicer to users it makes it a bit harder (more work) for someone who wants to hack your site as they are unsure of your page's language it gives you the flexibility to change technologies without requiring a new URL (from html to php for example) The only difference between your URLs then would be the trailing slash. It is a matter of personal preference but I add the trailing slash to indicate a folder, and no slash to indicate it is a file. Matt Cutts has a couple videos on URLs and file names which you may enjoy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRzMhlFZz9I http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=971qGsTPs8M

What I can recall from Matt Cutts is that Google is pretty much ignoring all meta tags besides the 'description' one. Given the fact that I've never even heard of this one, I think it is pretty save to assume it is of no value (atleast to search engines).

The tag is to prevent Microsoft Smart Tags from rendering.  It was only included in beta versions of IE6, and no other browsers since.  It's not worth including; you can safely delete these tags. An explanation of smart tags on wikipedia. The same question on stackoverflow.

Ryan is absolutely right. also adjust your .htaccess to link to either index.html of mysite.com/ RewriteRule ^.*/index.html http://www.mysite.com [R=301,L] Or RewriteRule ^.*/ http://www.mysite.com/index.html [R=301,L] Hope this helps