Meta tags for lot's of items

maybe a very novice question here and possibly in the wrong catagory but here goes.
I'm working on learning different SEO techniques and have run into the Meta Tags settings on the products that are entered into the cart. My question here is how do you handle these meta tags for hundreds or possibly thousands of products. I fear that I may already know the answer but if someone has any ideas then please let me know. I'm working with EZ Populate and am considering to start working on a mass import of 100's of products I have available.
I've been examining competitor web sites and am looking at Keywords etc on product pages and am getting a bit nervous at all the posible keywords that are possible and I may have to add.

Thanks

My suggestion would be to not spend a tremendous amount of time on this. Keywords in meta tags are disregarded by modern search engines. The fact that your competitors are doing it could be a helpful indication of cluelessness on their part.

There's nothing wrong with adding good keywords to your product description text, but remember: if it's spam, Google will recognize it as such sooner or later, and penalize you for it. Let the keywords flow naturally in the text. Your best bet for improving your ranking is creating a great site that lots of people link to that is recognized as an expert authority.

Good luck,
Scott

Oops! I forgot to mention this:
If you want to add some boilerplate and have it appear on every page (based on logic that you add to tune for category or whatever), look at:

http://www.thatsoftwareguy.com/zencart_php_in_description.html

Good luck,
Scott

CBO:

maybe a very novice question here and possibly in the wrong catagory but here goes.
I'm working on learning different SEO techniques and have run into the Meta Tags settings on the products that are entered into the cart. My question here is how do you handle these meta tags for hundreds or possibly thousands of products. I fear that I may already know the answer but if someone has any ideas then please let me know. I'm working with EZ Populate and am considering to start working on a mass import of 100's of products I have available.
I've been examining competitor web sites and am looking at Keywords etc on product pages and am getting a bit nervous at all the posible keywords that are possible and I may have to add.

Thanks

EasyPopulate Advanced provides option to mass populate the meta tags.