How Important Metatags is for SEO?

Is it really require?

[a1domain]

I have Read somewhere that Metatags like "Keyword" and "Description" is not much useful for Search Engine Optimization

More Important things is your desire keywords in your page content

- so to get higher position on search engine , metatags are more useful or keyword density is more useful?

I am bit confuse about that.
because i have one OSCom site where on front page product is displayed so i can't placed much content there

- Is there any proper way to do SEO for OScom. cart?

plz guide me about this

Thanks in Advance

[Marketing Guy]

On page keyword density is generally considered to be more important, but Meta data is coming back "into fashion" as it were. There is some evidence to suggest that well written Meta descriptions can help avoid your pages entering Google's supplemental index (although there are other factors too), and the description can be used for the snippet of text in search engine listings, so can be useful to encourage click throughs.

I'm pretty sure the OSC community can help you with SEO for the system - I'd guess there are plenty of mods you can make to your software to help SEO stuff. I'm not that familiar with it though, so I can't really comment.

MG

[Receptional]

I don't know about oscom. But the keyword tag is as good as redundant. On the other hand, page titles and the Description tag are still extremely important for SEO. The tile affects the engines' interpretation of the content and the description (and title) affect what the user sees in the results - which affects their click though rate. So yes - those tags are important.

[a1domain]

OK Thanks for reply.

But suppose If I dont have any content on my page (May be fully Flash Site) so there is no chance to add that keyword on frontpage then what will happen?

Should my site consider about that keywords which is in metatags or my site didn't consider in any keyword?

plz. guide me

Thanks in Advance

[Robert Charlton]

If I dont have any content on my page (May be fully Flash Site)...

Rebuild the site in html and link to the Flash version as an option (or junk the Flash version and chalk it up to experience).

Seriously, there may be some minor things you can do to get recognized for the company name, if it happens to be unique, but Flash is missing so many of the elements from which the engines take their cues... both content and structural... that an all-Flash site will never rank well for anything even slightly competitive.

[topr8]

keywords metatag is still vital for misleading your competitors

[pbaddock]

Also - you'll find a few nice mods / plugins for osCommerce on the community contributions page: [oscommerce.com...]

I recommend these ie SEF url's and such - they make a huge difference to the indexability of the site and the consequent PR achieved.

In particular lookout for the osCid=blah problem which is common for osCommerce. One of my clients got bitten by that (osCommerce enables a url based session id where is detects a lack of browser cookies which resutls in things like your pages being pushed into the supplemental index or not indexed properly), and there's a fix for this:
[oscommerce.com...]

....anyway - do a search on google for site:yoursitename.com to see if you're suffering from this problem.....if you see lots of www.yoursitename.com/page-name.php&osCid=12343243242343 type stuff - then you've been bitten.

[edited by: pageoneresults at 1:49 pm (utc) on Jan. 2, 2007]
[edit reason] Delinked URI Example [/edit]