What are all those meta name= and link rel= on the cnn home page source?

[waspmobile]

I usually use Description, title and keywords tag. I keep seeing these meta name = "classification" or "distribution" and also link rel =stylesheet" and "pingback" etc.

Please tell me how important this is for SEO. It would be great to be pointed to the right page.

Also, is there a wordpress pluggin to just fill in and have these be populated on the front end?

Thank You

[waspmobile]

Thanks a lot guys. This is great.

The reason we use use keyword tags is that it is still a ranking factor for Bing and Yahoo. (This is true right?)

[StreamlineMetrics]

Here is a site that explains these kinds of meta tags in detail - http://www.metatags.org/all_metatags. And here is a site with information about the link rel= tags - http://blog.whatwg.org/the-road-to-html-5-link-relations.

Most sites will be fine just using Meta Description and Title tags for SEO.

As for WordPress SEO, I highly recommend WordPress SEO by Yoast - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-seo/

[CaseyKluver]

John Doherty did a great post a while back on meta tags that will NOT help SEO. As you can see, "classification" is on that list.

The rel="stylesheet" is just pulling in all of the website's CSS styles. Design related, not SEO.

You can read more about pingback's here.

By default WordPress includes stylesheets and your pingback URL.

You also mentioned you are using meta keyword tags still, I would recommend removing those, they have not been a ranking factor for quite some time now, you are just giving your competitors an insight to the keywords you are targeting.