Meta Tags

This is my standard metadata header that I add to all pages.

The top three are I think pretty standard, though what are your thoughts on the bottom 5 am I wasting my time using em..

I like to have creator in there, for a little extra promo if someone happens to view the site.

Robots - Im pretty sure that robots will follow the links if this isn't there anyway, am I right? Though if you say No will that stop them also?
Revisit-after - Depending on the frequency of changes I set this between 7 & 21days
Classification - This is usually the same between all sites.

Reason Im wondering about this is that I used a Spider Simulator and it gave me a warning, saying I have 8 Metatags, are you sure you need that many?

So it got me thinking, and I thought it was a pretty basic set compared to the Government sites that I hve worked on in the past.

Honestly I haven't even heard of some of the meta tag you are using. (the classification..!?!?!)

The robots tags are almost useless. As long as you have a robots.txt file they should keep going and indexing. But something that worries me more than the robot tags, is that you have one of them set to revisit you in 21 days. Assuming that they do follow the command, I would want them back a lot sooner than that! Hopefully they would visit you every day (or at least a couple times a week).

As for the description, and keywords tags....they are almost dead too...

The keywords tags got soooo abused, that google pays little attention to them. Yahoo! and MSN still deal with them, but
most of your traffic from a SEO'd page will come from google.

Also with the keywords tag, make sure you don't use the same keyword over and over again, on every page. You will want to specify new keywords on every page that has some sort of different content.


The description tag is good, but remember to keep it short, and concise. You can use keywords here, but keep them to a few.

You really want you keywords in the body of your page, in link text, and in <H1><H2><H3> tags.


Overall I think that you could do with just the keywords, description and (optionally) the classification tags.

Cheers!

Gnome

thanks mate.. I was starting to think the same about the robots tag.. With the re-visit stuff, Like I mention in my first post I had that set according to the level of update activity.

I found that setting it higher say @ 21days and only updating the site around once a month, I retained a better position then a site that I told Google to come back every 7days but only update once a month. Two different sites so a bit hard to really compare, just what I had noticed though.

Re: Classification
http://www.html-reference.com/META_name_classification.htm

The DC. meta tags are part of the Dublin Core set and are used as part of the AGLS metadata set. AGLS is Austrlian Government Locator Service and is a standard that Aus Government sites need to adhere to. I thought those were two tags that seemed like a good idea.

I think these two are useless for most search engines:



Most will pay attention to robots noindex, but index,follow is what spiders do by default. And no spider I know pays any attention to revisit-after

The other ones aren't really needed and most search engines won't take any notice of them.

yeah true that.. I think Im going to keep the DC.Creator but the others way end up getting dropped in future, cleaner code all the way huh??

Clean code is nice, but as far as seo goes it won't do you any harm (nor any good). The only time when it'd be better to get rid of those meta tags is when your page is over 100KB (supposibly google's limit for pages).