Newcomers to Internet marketing should not heed this type of advice.

The search engines explicitly recommend the use of meta tags. Do some research. SEO juniors need to read what the search engines have to say about proper usage of meta tags and why they are important to the search engines, then make up their own minds about if and how to use meta tags.

Suggesting otherwise, is like selling someone a car without any brakes. Yep, the car will run fine until it needs to come to a stop. Why would you want to under-equip a newcomer in SEO. Advanced web site promotion specialists may have sufficient content crafting abilities to alleviate many basic SEO elements, but those types of exceptionally skilled Internet marketers need not come here for SEO tips and advice.

According to the search engines and not the nobodies that stymiee is referring to, it always a good SEO practice to suggest something to the search engines using meta tags which should briefly highlight the unique and pertinent web page content. MSN and Yahoo are very clear about this. Google is a little wishy-washy when it comes to explaining how and why to use meta tags but that is not an indication that they do not gather up information within the meta tags for consideration. Google reads everything and with its thousands of web content filtering mechanisms, meta tags when they are available are undoubtedly factored into rankings.

Now, if you have something to hide or if you are trying to inject a secondary "hidden" agenda ... well then maybe it wouldn't be such a good idea to use meta tags then eh.