Meta tags aren't obligatory - but they can increase your rankings with the search engines. Some search engines will simply copy the first few words of your page as their description and keywords - others will use your meta tags to describe your web page.
I'll cover the most common tags here - check out the resources below for the full range, and for more techie stuff about how they work.
The Keywords tag
The keyword tag should list the words and phrases that you think your visitors will use when searching for your web site. Optimising keywords is a whole industry - but you can do it yourself if you are willing to put in the time and effort. You can find some excellent articles here: http://www.seochat.com/c/b/Choosing-Keyw...
An excellent free program for finding the best keywords for your site is Good Keywords http://www.goodkeywords.com/
The Description tag
The description tag is just that - a description of your web page. Tailor each tag to the page it appears on - don't use the same description for every page of your site.
The Robots tag
Search engines use robots to index new pages, and to update the index as webmasters add and remove pages. You may have pages that you don't want indexed - private "members only" pages, or pages that you're still working on, for example. You can use the "Robots" meta tag to try and control how and when robots index your site - but not all search engines will recognise or obey this tag.
"Follow" and "Nofollow" simply tells the robot whether you want it to follow and index links from your page, or not. The default if you don't use this tag is Index, Follow.
Other tags
Two other fairly common tags are
If you use an HTML editor, it may have the tags already inserted when you create a new page, or it may have "quick creation" options for you to use. I have an online tag creation utility on my website: http://www.firstwebbuilder.co.uk/metatag...
More information
These sites give more information on available meta tags, and how they work:
http://www.philb.com/metatag.htm
http://webdeveloper.com/html/html_metata...
http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/...
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