I installed my vbulletin forum and there is an option to put in meta keywords. can someone tell me what they are

Meta keywords used to be very important for search engines. It was a universal place that site owners could put a list of words which related to their site so the search engines knew where to list them. Nowadays, meta keywords are not very important...I'm pretty sure Yahoo is the only search engine that still uses them - Google does not.

It's not going to hurt putting them in there, but I can't guarantee that it will help a whole lot either.

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I did some experimenting with the meta tags, and they do still help. There are a lot of directory crawlers out there that will only add sites with meta tags. Therefore if you have them and they add you, the bigger search engines will crawl them thus giving you better rankings.

the company i work for has around 50 sites, and all of them that have bene around for atleast 6 months have a PR4 except 1 which is currently PR3

Pr 1,2,3 and 4 are easy to get if you spend the time. Going higher than that is a lot harder, but still possiable. The mian thing is encouraging people to link back to you. But with the meta tags you get some directorys that will link back to you for free, so make sure that you have them filled in nicely

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