I discovered that my homepage does not include meta tags which could optimise the search engine retrieval rate. So as the site could do with more hits, I had a quick Google on the topic. The hits of older date all seem to consider meta tagging to be very important, but the items of newer date seem to be fairly unanimous that the search engines are now sophisticated:

Major search engine robots are more likely to quantify such extant factors as the volume of incoming links from related websites, quantity and quality of content, technical precision of source code, spelling, functional v. broken hyperlinks, volume and consistency of searches and/or viewer traffic, time within website, page views, revisits, click-throughs, technical user-features, uniqueness, redundancy, relevance, advertising revenue yield, freshness, geography, language and other intrinsic characteristics.

(An aside – why do people not date their entries? It would make searching the net so much easier!)
So – do I insert meta tags, descriptors etc? I think I’ll add some, it’ll be interesting to see if the hit rate improves.