I was thinking of going through my entire site with individual article pages and adding meta tags to each page, I have over 50 pages that I would need to manually do this to. Do you think it would be worth it or a waste of time? I used to use wordpress to automatically do everything but I didn't like it because it was cumbersome.
It would be a great idea. Suggestion, run a Keyword Density Analyzer on each page to see what is the dominant keyword phrase and take the results and do your Google Keyword Tool Analysis (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) on them. You should get some great SEOed articles. And then write a series of articles on the process.
You may read that Google is placing less emphasis on meta information. Having said that, I believe that it is good practice to include them and more importantly, optimise them, so as to ensure that any future changes to the Google algorithm will not force you to rewrite them at a later date anyway.
I believe it would be beneficial to ensure that each of your pages has keyword rich titles and i also like to write a meta description for your important pages. Although this does not improve your ranking with Google it is a great opportunity to sell your page. The keywords within your descriptions will also be displayed as bold, which will grab a potential readers attention
It definatley would pay to do at least the important pages...but if I were you i would redo all the meta across the entire site.....Meta Title are the best place for your keywords....but make the title and description relevant to the page. Title: 65 characters or less Description: 155 characters or less keywords: no more than 10 per page
better you have to write unique meta-tags on every pages corresponds content, do it not manually but dynamic. it's worked ;-)