I am sure that most know this but I see meta tags being ignored by people who say that google is only interested in page content. Recently I have been having lots of new pages indexed and google always used the meta tags as the page description despite the page having good content. After a few weeks the page content replaces the meta tag description on the serps. I am now paying more attention to meta tags than before.
Google does use the <title> tag. The description tag is used sometimes for the "snippet" displayed in the search results, depending on the search term and where else that appears in the listed item. Google does not appear to use the description tag for ranking the page. It does not appear that Google pays any attention at all to other meta tags at this point. Not accurate. There's nothing wrong with using meta refresh as a page redirection solution, especially if you don't have access to htaccess. What you do need to do is ensure that you don't set the refresh interbal too low - generally, a minimum of 10 seconds is recommended to avoid having it seen as a "cloaking" or misdirection strategy.
Thought "interbal" was a new geeky word for a moment - that I was going to have to look up - then I remembered that b is next to v on the keyboard.
That's the opposite of what I've been reading, Google doesn't seem to use meta tags any longer because of spam. But I would use meta tags because of (espcecially)MSN and Yahoo.
You can get credit for commonly misspelled words by including them in your meta KWs. MSN actually pays the least amount of attention to meta tags. In fact, they cleaim they don't use them for the SERPs at all. As to the redirect issue - I used the word "avoid" deliberately. It is best if you can use the .htaccess but when you can't a meta redirect is better than a js IMO.
besides description and title, Google also invites the use of the RSS feed tag <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Your Feed Title" href="http://www.example.com/rss.xml" /> details see http://www.google.com/webmasters/bot.html#autodiscovery or the other one for Atom feeds on above page while Yahoo accepts an active ping for RSS updates - Google does all the work by autodiscovery of the feeds using above tags in the header section of pages
I have different key words for each new page of my website -- the meta tags hold each of these words as well as a new description I am reaching well over 300 pages for my site at this point and its only been 2 months since I launched it getting a lot of traffic too!