Question: Are META Tags still an important part of developing a website? What search engines use them, if any?  Is it still important, to some degree, in writing a page (even if only one of many things you need to do to improve search results).

Answer: Meta tags do not affect the display of a website at all, but provide useful information to web "crawlers", which can affect the search ratings.\n\nMany people will tell you that google ignores meta tags. While this is not totally true, google does not rely very much on meta tags because they can easily be used to misrepresent the page to get better rankings.\n\nIf you want to increase your search ranking for certain keywords, here are some tips:\n\nMake the title relivent, and include some keywords if it won't make it tacky. For example, on the index page, you could discribe your business in a few words in the title.\n\nAlso, try to use the keywords in your writing without making the text sound aqward.
This question from the Yahoo Q&A forum is categorized in the topic: Business & Finance