Hey all! I want to update my meta tags for my site (See my Profile) and I need some advice on if this is the right direction or not.

First off, my traffic is okay, but I'm looking to get from 1,000 visitors a day to about 5,000 with a 20% monthly growth.

I have about 20,000 pages on the site (which you won't be able to see until I re-do the navigation) I'm NOT interested in changing how I maintain the pages (generated from a database and XML) so these metas a patterns that with information that is plugged in by my database.

I do NOT have a small set of keywords that I am targeting. I want to be listed top page for searches like "(the name of a city) (state) camping" Ex: "Prescott Arizona Camping" and for searches for a specific attraction's name ex: Katherines Landing.

I am not looking for keywords like 'camping'. It's just too broad. I do USE camping as a keyword because it will help with that page, I know that I'll never come up for just the word CAMPING in any engine.

I am listed in all major search engines. We've been online since early 2004.


Stuff in [brackets] will be pulled from the database, stuff in <tags> will be pulled from the related XML file.


Keywords for states, regions, popcenter: [xml title], <keyword>, bike, campgrounds, camping, fish, fishing, golf courses, golf, hike, hiking, hunting, lakes, museums, national forests, national parks, outdoor recreation, rivers, trails, wildlife, EatStayPlay.com, [state], [region], [popcenter]

*if it is a state- list all the regions and popcenters; if it is a region- list all the popcenters; if it is a popcenter- list the region and state

Keywords for mini-description pages: [category title], [attraction names], EatStayPlay.com

Keywords for attraction, non-profit, merchant pages: [attraction name], <keyword>, [category title with no commas between the category names, just run them all together into a phrase], mountain biking, campgrounds, camping, fish, fishing, hike, hiking, hiking trails, hunting, lakes, national forests, national parks, outdoor recreation, rivers, trails, wildlife, EatStayPlay.com, [state], [region], [popcenter]


Miscellaneous Pages, not index
Title: Welcome to EatStayPlay.com - America's Outdoor Recreation Connection
Description: EatStayPlay.com: everything you need to know about places to eat, places to stay, and places to play.
Keywords: attractions, cities, eatstayplay.com, outdoor recreation, recreation,
Revisit-after: 25 days

Index
Title: Welcome to EatStayPlay.com - America's Outdoor Recreation Connection
Description: EatStayPlay.com: everything you need to know about places to eat, places to stay, and places to play.
Keywords: afternoon adventure, animal watching, aquariums, bird watching, public campgrounds, EatStayPlay Inc, EatStayPlay.com, fishing, golf courses, historic sites, hunting, monuments, national forests, outdoor recreation, recreation, sledding, trails, vacation, weekend getaway, winter sports, zoos,
Revisit-after: 14 days

State Pages
Title: Information about [STATE] - EatStayPlay.com
Revisit-after: 20 days

Region pages
Title: Information about [Region] [state] - EatStayPlay.com
Revisit-after: 20 days

Popcenter Pages
Description:EatStayPlay.com has outdoor recreation information for [popcenter], [state]. Find information about golfing, camping, hiking, National Forests and more!
Title: Information about [popcenter], [state]
Revisit-after: 11 days

Mini-description pages
Title: Information about [Category title] in [popcenter], [state]
Revisit-after: 14 days

Attractions, non-profits, merchants
Title: [xml name] [popcenter], [state]
Revisit-after: 14 days


And, how important are these:
<META NAME="abstract" CONTENT="EatStayPlay.com: everything you need to know about places to eat, places to stay, and places to play">
<META NAME="resource-type" CONTENT="document">
<META NAME="distribution" CONTENT="global">
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="INDEX,FOLLOW">
<META name="Author" CONTENT="EatStayPlay, Inc">

I wasn't planning on changing them, do I need to?

I dont much care for your titles. Your domain name should not be in them, they seem a little keyword light. Eat sleep and play, might be better as <city/state> Hotels, resturants, campgrounds, amusment parks, lodging etc etc. You might even consider more granularity to your pages so you get down to things like brand names of places or catergories like resturants in Denver, Amusment parks in Denver etc etc, I dont know, Anahiem California Hotels near Disneyland for example.
Your descriptions the same thing, get the domain name out of there, does not help. More keywords, that are specific to what the page is offering.
It is really worth adding another field to your data base and writing descriptions for a lot of pages (you usaully find something in your text that works reasonable well), especially if what you can put together now is not easily readable, or just plain hard to make sense of to a human.

Thanks Pokersearch.

The only places where my business name appears in the title are my misc pages which I know are non-popular entry pages.

As for adding fields to the database, they all currenly exist so that's no problem. As I said (I THINK I said it...) I have 25,000+ pages so I don't really have the time to set the metas by hand.

Not all the pages of course, but your more improtant top level pages. The better page popularity that you have on a page, the more time you should spend with it, on the keywords and stuff that work for what you are selling. I noticed you have some 2 and 3's and those are worth taking the time for.

Your document should begin with a !DOCTYPE (this tells the browser what sort of HTML is in the file) followed by the <html> and <head> tags:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>



For your page to actually be valid you MUST declare the character encoding (lets the browser know whether to use A to Z letters (Latin), or Chinese, Japanese, Thai, or Arabic script, or some other character set) used for the page, with something like:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

There are also other schemes such as UTF-8 and many others.



It is also a good idea to declare what human language the page is in, using:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="EN-GB">

The language and country codes come from ISO 4217 and ISO 3166. This is useful for online translation tools as well. Change the "en" and "gb" to whatever language and country you need.



You need a <title> element for the page:

<title> Your Title Here </title>

This is displayed at the top of the browser window, and stored as the name of the bookmark if someone bookmarks the page URL in their browser. Most importantly, it is the <title> tag that is indexed and displayed by search engines in the search results page (SERPs).



You need the meta description tag, as this is very important for search engines, and it is useful but not vital to have a meta keywords tag:

<meta name="Description" content=" Your Description Here. ">
<meta name="Keywords" content=" your, keyword, list, here ">



Most search engines do obey the robots meta tag. The default robots action is index, follow (index the page, follow all outbound links) so if you want something else (3 possibilities) then add the robots tag to the page in question. If you want to exclude whole directories then use the robots.txt file for this instead of marking every HTML file with the tag.

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow">



The last parts of your header should have your links to external style sheets and external javascript files:


Use this if the stylesheet is for all browsers:

<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" src="/path/file.css">


Use this for style sheet that you want to hide from older browsers, as older browsers often crash on seeing CSS:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css">
<style type="text/css"> @import url(/path/file.css); </style>


Use this for the javascript:

<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="/path/file.js"></script>



End the header with this:

</head>
<body>

and then continue with the body page code.



It is as simple as that.