Meta tags rule of thumb

[theremotedr]

Is there a rule of thumb for writing Meta tags ?

Looking around the internet i see the following,
<meta name="keywords" content="HTML, CSS, XML, XHTML, JavaScript">
<meta name="description" content="Info about web page here">
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="30">

My pages have the following and one or two of the above,
<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge">

Can you advise what should i be putting at the top of each page.

[Beverleyh]

Meta tag recommendations have changed over time but here is a nice article detailing some modern usage examples and best practices http://www.sitepoint.com/meta-tags-h...est-practices/

Personally, I tend to use these;

<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, minimum-scale=1" />
<meta name="author" content="Beverley Hooton"/>
<meta name="keywords" content="a, dozen, useful, keywords, relating, to, page, content"/>
<meta name="description" lang="en" content="A description full of interesting info about the web page, that will hopefully entice visitors to visit from search results"/>

I just use the author one as a way of labelling my work and the keywords one just helps tie in with the main description (although it doesn't have a direct bearing on search so isnt really necessary)

[theremotedr]

The problem i face is that pretty much all of my pages are the same thing,example keys but for different makes of vehicles.
How do i stand with trying to write many pages about them whenm i have read each need to be different.

[jscheuer1]

For that you would mostly concern yourself with the description and keywords tags. There are two approaches relevant to your question:

1.) List and cover everything on every page.

2.) Only list and cover those specific things that relate to that page on each page.

The second will probably get you better SEO and human responses from search engines, though the former is obviously easier to manage. I don't think there;s a huge difference. But, as a n example. Say someone wants a Honda remote. They search Google for that. If that's listed in every page's meta tags, they may get every page as results in their search. Hopefully only the pages with Honda remotes have that in their title or have words like that in their text, so those results should come up higher in the results, but there's less of a guarantee. If only pages that have Honda remotes mention that in their mets tags, those will for sure be higher in the results and may outweigh even higher traffic sites that use those keywords on pages where Honda remotes are not featured.

[theremotedr]

I understand meta tags must be different on each page.
So can you please tell me if this is acceptable.

Honda key remotes,cheapest in the uk & free delivery etc etc.

Copy & paste the above into every page but changing the Honda For Fiat or Ford or Suzuki etc etc on the respective page.

[jscheuer1]

That would be good for the description one, yes.