SEO META Tags - HTML

Question

So I might be asking this in the wrong place. I figured since it technically does have to do with markup, it might make sense to post it here.

Issue

I have my site registered with the three major search engines - Google, Yahoo, and Bing. I have webmaster tools setup for all 3, and frequently check things like traffic, search queries, etc. Recently, I decided to go to Google and just search for some terms related to my site. A bunch of similar sites came up, but not mine. When you search for my site directly, we are the first one - so that's good. So my main issue is, we're no where to be seen when searching terms that describe our site, we only have the more "direct" market down.

Question

How can I get these search engines to start letting these terms find my site as well? Is this only done by just creating a random META tag on each page on my website, and doing something like this?

<META name="keywords" content="location, based, messaging, social, network, service, nearby, friends, community, neighborhood, local, events" />

I already have some META tags on my site, but they are the ones to actually set it up and register it with those webmaster tools, I'm assuming I wouldn't do this keyword registration there.

Now, after I set a META tag up like the one I posted above, do I kind of just wait until these search engines register everything? Is this even the best way to do this? Is this even a way to do this?

Updated: The meta tag was missing forward slash for closing the tag. It may be the cause the Search engines ignoring the website/page

Answer 1

Search engines started to drop support for the keywords tag in 1998 and finished by 2002!

The only tags that have anything to do with SEO are the title tag and the meta description tag.

Do you have words you want to link to your site on the site?

I'd recommend starting a blog, then using that to write about things you do, that way you definitely have terms that you want to rank for on the page.

Answer 2

Keyword META isn't really used by search engines anymore. Too many people where putting irrelavant "search bait" in there.

The new preferred system to use "rich snippets": http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=21997