Question

I was wondering if using HTML entities in meta tags (like keywords and description) is the best way to go?

Does it influence the indexing from search engines?

Answer 1

I’d put the meta tags contents without entities as long as my charset allows the chars. I researched a bit and I found this on Google Webmasters/Site owners help and the example contains £9.24 not £9.24 nor £9.24

As is true that meta tags aren’t a big factor for success, they can be a factor for failure. Indexer robots may detect a try of cheat them by using invalid keywords or description. From Wikipedia:

Early versions of search algorithms
relied on webmaster-provided
information such as the keyword meta
tag, or index files in engines like
ALIWEB. Meta tags provide a guide to
each page’s content. But using meta
data to index pages was found to be
less than reliable because the
webmaster’s choice of keywords in the
meta tag could potentially be an
inaccurate representation of the
site’s actual content. Inaccurate,
incomplete, and inconsistent data in
meta tags could and did cause pages to
rank for irrelevant searches. Web
content providers also manipulated a
number of attributes within the HTML
source of a page in an attempt to rank
well in search engines.