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[cogs]

i'm trying to get more (lol or, some) traffic by formulating a good meta tag. here are my questions:
1. does the meta tag really matter regarding traffic?
2. should the metadata be different for every site page?
3. is the index.shtml the most important regarding metadata?
4. if i use the keywords people use, from my google analytics, will this help more?
thank you, cogs

edit: here's what i created for metadata in index.shtml:

Code:

<title>Piano Guitar Tutorial Sharps Flats Voice Music ABCDEF</title>
 <meta name="DESCRIPTION" content="B sharp, while playing Guitar, Piano,
   Violin, or even voice: learn about the sharps and flats rule, triplets,
   pentatonics, enharmonics, counts, fingering charts, thirds, intervals, bar
   lines... A B C D E F G sounds like:">
  <meta name="KEYWORDS" content="b sharp triplets intervals thirds parallel
    pentatonics triplet bar lines violin  sounds like fingering charts enharmonics
    counts  sharp and flat rule a b f g">

[kalam_01]

Your meta description is what should show up as the description of your site when it comes up on a google search so its a good idea to make it a good one. The Title and Description should be different for every page. Your index page is probably the most important page since its your homepage. As for keywords, I dont think google really looks at the meta keywords anymore, it looks at the text of the whole page so if you want to come up for a certain keyword try saying it a lot in the text of your page, it also helps if you have it in a heading like h1 or h2. Other search engines like Yahoo might still use the meta keywords, I'm not sure. You've gotta go beyond just making ur metatags to get traffic, you could try directory submission or link exchange programs ect. I just realized ive gotten 98 hits in the past 4 days from the directory: http://directory.classifieds1000.com/ because I submitted my site to it and a link my site ended up on their home page with a screen shot of it and everything. I guess I just got lucky there, not really sure how they decide what listings show up on their first page.

good luck 

[earn-it-now]

here's a nice free tool for analyzing title/description/keyword relevance
http://www.seocentro.com/tools/search-engines/metatag-analyzer.html

[cogs]

thank you both... the link was quite helpful.

[Kelly2]

Please ignore Kalam, he obviously doesn't know what he is talking about. All, or most mainstream search engines like Google, and MSN both ignore meta tags. So having them is pointless unless you want to appear in search engines getting 500 people a day.

Focus on your content, you only really need a "TITLE" tag and some BODY content for anything to index you.

[cogs]

well, what i was really trying to do is 'shake things up'. my normal configuration gets me no traffic. i've submitted to search engines, and to directories. two things i wonder:
1. is it that' i've written my pages like a book?
2. i'm lacking a links page, because i haven't found a free online reciprocal links tracker that's free.

shouldn't i get organic search results despite no linkbacks? 

[kalam_01]

wow that was nice KellyAX. I did say "As for keywords, I dont think google really looks at the meta keywords anymore", I dont know about other search engines. I also said you should focus on the body/page content which is sorta like what you said.

What part of what I said was wrong?

[cogs]

kalam, regarding the description, doesn't it appear because it has keywords that people type into the searchbox? if that's so, then it's very important to have keywords in the description. thank you for your information, it's valuable to me.

[SoCalSubbuteo]

Google does not use the meta keyword tag.  The keywords that it decides your site are about is determined from the title tag, headings (H1, H2, etc), & the text in links to your sites (incoming link text).

The meta description is not used to determine keywords or rankings.  But it can be used as the snippet for your page in the SERP (Search Engine Result Pages) if Google thinks that it is relevant.  If your meta description is just a list of words as you have in your original post looks very spammy.

Each page should have its own unique meta description, which should be about 170 characters, that describes the contents of that page.

You might trying reading this post in Google's Webmaster Blog -> here