Which search engines use meta tags to determine their rankings and in
what way should a site's meta tags be written in order to garner the
best results?

Greetings, multics!

With the exception of Inktomi, which still does grant a *little*
weight to <meta> tags, the major Search Engines these days no longer
use <meta> keyword and description tags to help determine Search
Rankings. However, several of them, including Google, do still look at
the <meta> tags purely as an additional verification, to ensure that
they match the text on the page.

There are probably lots of minor Search Engines which still use <meta>
tags to calculate Rankings, but since it is estimated that 80 to 90%
of all Search Engine traffic comes from Google, I encourage you not to
focus on <meta> tags.

"In order to garner the best results", you need to do a great job with
your *TEXT*, and not worry too much about your <meta> tags, other than
to ensure that they are consistent with the text content on your site.


1. Sit down and write a list of the MOST important individual words
associated with your site's content. Then rank these words 1, 2, 3...
from most important to least important.

2. Then do the same thing for any special 2-word phrases that you feel
are especially important.

3. Then do the same thing for any special 3-word phrases.

4. Then, take the text content on your home page, and make sure you
have included the top 3 words/phrases on each of these three lists at
least 3 times each in the content of that page.

5. Then make sure you have included the words/phrases in positions 4,
5, and 6 on each of these three lists at least twice each in the
content of that page.

6. Then make sure you have included the words/phrases in positions 7
and up on each of these three lists at least once each in the content
of that page.

7. You will need to make sure that you work these words and phrases
into actual meaningful, grammatically correct sentences. DON'T JUST
LIST ALL THESE WORDS IN THE TEXT ON YOUR PAGE -- the Googlebot can
detect that, and it considers that a "spamming" technique.

8. Once you have completed this, you can run your modified home page
into SearchEngineWorld's Keyword Density Analyzer at:
http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/kwda.cgi 


Then, you can repeat Steps 1-8 for each of the pages on your site
(since each page should have a different focus -- such as "About Us",
"Prices" "Shipping Information", etc, and therefore, should also have
different content.

This should really help your site be indexed to turn up in the
Searches that are relevant to your site.


Before Rating my Answer, if you have any questions about this
information, please post a Request for Clarification, and I will see
what I can do for you.
   
I hope that this Answer provides exactly the information that you
needed.
        
aceresearcher

Thank you very much!