Robert_Charlton - 2:33 am on Jan 3, 2003 (gmt 0)

>>Regarding meta tags - I put the entire list (it's a long one)
of meta tags on every page in the site.<<

Amy - Welcome to WebmasterWorld. The above sounds like you're talking about the meta keywords tag. It's pretty unlikely that the meta keywords tag is going to help you rank on any search engine these days... and even when it did help, the longer it was, the less likely it was to help.

Here are a couple of threads about meta tags...

This one discusses the length of the keywords tag:
[webmasterworld.com...]

This one discusses the intelligent use of meta tags, and as you can see as you read all of it (and I recommend that you do), the original post was perpetuating some misunderstandings about how useful the tags were...
[webmasterworld.com...]

And here's [searchenginewatch.com] by Danny Sullivan about the "Death of a Meta Tag," which talks about the history of the meta keywords tag... and about why it's now ancient history.

The title tag is technically not a meta tag, though it's sometimes grouped with them... and that tag is very important to search. There are a lot of reasons why what you can effectively target on one page is limited. The length of the title tag is among them. Try to keep this tag under 60 or 70 characters... less for competitive phrases.

Large catalogue sites are particularly hard to optimize. Page focus is extremely important. So, to get back to your original question, whether you use meta keywords or not... you want to think of each page as being optimized for a few phrases, at most, made up of not very many words. Hope this helps.