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META tags are hidden code read only by search engine webcrawlers (also called spiders). They live within the HEAD section of a web page. There are actually 2 very important META tags you need to worry about: description and keywords.
1. description
2. keywords
Sequencing of these tags may be extremely important. I say “may” because SEO is mostly hypothesis due to the changing algorithms of the search engines. Even though the W3C states that tag attributes do not have to be in any particular sequence, I’ve noticed a significant difference when I have the tags and attributes in the order described here. The only deviation from the list above is that the Title tag should come before the META description.

The description META tag is the text that will be displayed under your title on the results page. See the OC Internet Advertising example above. There’s also a lot of controversy about the number of characters you should have in this tag. I’ve seen sites with a paragraph in their description listed in the top results, so I don’t think the number of characters here plays any kind of role with the search engines.

<meta name=”description” content=”your_keywords_here followed by a statement about your product service or organization.” />

The last important META tag is the keywords META tag, which some time ago lost a lot of points in Google’s search engine algorithm. Along with being valuable to this top 10 SEO tips list, this tag is still important to many other search engines and should not be ignored. Based on my experience with this tag, you can have approximately 800 characters in this tag (including spaces).

The <blockquote> tag will enable you to indent your text from the left and right margins within your web page. However, it won’t enable you to indent your text from just one side.

If you would like to indent your text from the left margin only, you can use the <UL> tag (the same tag you would use to create a bulleted list). The only difference is that you won’t use the <LI> tags with it. Your text will be indented just as a bulleted list is, but there won’t be any bullets.

This example is displayed using the <UL> tag without the <LI> tags. Notice how the text is indented from the left margin.

<UL>
Place your text between the <UL> and </UL tags without the <LI> tags.
</UL>

The HEADING tag is used to display your heading text in a larger font with <H1> being the largest down to <H6> being the smallest.

Some Search Engines place relevance on text displayed within the <H#> tags, so place some of your most relevant keywords within any of the 6 <Hx> tags.

Example:

<H3>Your Guide to Health & Fitness</H3>

When using the HEADING tags, you don’t have to use the <H1> for your first heading. You may begin with the heading size of your choice. However, for your secondary headings, you should not use a larger heading than you began with. In other words, if you’re using <H3> for your primary heading, then your secondary headings should be <H4> or <H5> and not <H1> or <H2>.

Before rushing off and registering your domain make sure it has the appropriate meta and title tags and that the web site has been optimised.

Some search engines are now indexing Web documents by the meta tags in the documents’ HTML (at the beginning of the document in the so-called “head” tag). What this means is that the Web page author can have some influence over which keywords are used to index the document, and even in the description of the document that appears when it comes up as a search engine hit.

This is obviously very important if you are trying to draw people to your website based on how your site ranks in search engines hit lists.

There is no perfect way to ensure that you’ll receive a high ranking.  Even if you do get a great ranking, there’s no assurance that you’ll keep it for long.  For example, at one period a page from the Spider’s Apprentice was the number- one-ranked result on Altavista for the phrase “how search engines work.”   A few months later, however, it had dropped lower in the listings.

There is a lot of conflicting information out there on meta-tagging.  If you’re confused it may be because different search engines look at meta tags in different ways.  Some rely heavily on meta tags, others don’t use them at all.  The general opinion seems to be that meta tags are less useful than they were a few years ago, largely because of the high rate of spamdexing (web authors using false and misleading keywords in the meta tags).

Note:  Google, currently the most popular search engine, does not index the keyword metatags.  Be aware of this is you are optimizing your webpages for the Google engine.

It seems to be generally agreed that the “title” and the “description” meta tags are important to write effectively, since several major search engines use them in their indices.   Use relevant keywords in your title, and vary the titles on the different pages that make up your website, in order to target as many keywords as possible.  As for the “description” meta tag, some search engines will use it as their short summary of your url, so make sure your description is one that will entice surfers to your site.

Note:  The “description” meta tag is generally held to be the most valuable, and the most likely to be indexed, so pay special attention to this one.

In the keyword tag, list a few synonyms for keywords, or foreign translations of keywords (if you anticipate traffic from foreign surfers).  Make sure the keywords refer to, or are directly related to, the subject or material on the page.  Do NOT use false or misleading keywords in an attempt to gain a higher ranking for your pages.

The “keyword” meta tag has been abused by some webmasters.  For example, a recent ploy has been to put such words “sex” or “mp3″ into keyword meta tags, in hopes of luring searchers to one’s website by using popular keywords.

The search engines are aware of such deceptive tactics, and have devised various methods to circumvent them, so be careful.  Use keywords that are appropriate to your subject, and make sure they appear in the top paragraphs of actual text on your webpage.  Many search engine algorithms score the words that appear towards the top of your document more highly than the words that appear towards the bottom.  Words that appear in HTML header tags (H1, H2, H3, etc) are also given more weight by some search engines.  It sometimes helps to give your page a file name that makes use of one of your prime keywords, and to include keywords in the “alt” image tags.

One thing you should not do is use some other company’s trademarks in your meta tags.  Some website owners have been sued for  trademark violations because they’ve used other company names in the meta tags.  I have, in fact, testified as an expert witness in such cases.  You do not want the expense of being sued!

Remember that all the major search engines have slightly different policies.  If you’re designing a website and meta-tagging your documents, we recommend that you take the time to check out what the major search engines say in their help files about how they each use meta tags.  You might want to optimize your meta tags for the search engines you believe are sending the most traffic to your site.

Having a Web site that gets found in Google isn’t hard to do, but it can be difficult to know where to begin. Here are ten tips to get you started.

1. Start out slowly. If possible, begin with a new site that has never been submitted to the search engines or directories. Choose an appropriate domain name, and start out by optimizing just the home page.

2. Learn basic HTML. Many search engine optimization techniques involve editing the behind the scenes HTML code. Your high rankings can depend on knowing which codes are necessary, and which aren’t.

3. Choose keywords wisely. The keywords you think might be perfect for your site may not be what people are actually searching for. To find the optimal keywords for your site, use tools such as WordTracker. Choose two or three highly targeted phrases for each page of your site. Never shoot for general keywords such as “travel” or “vacation.”

4. Write at least 200 - 250 words of visible text copy based on your chosen keywords. This is a crucial component to high rankings and a successful Web site. The search engines need to “read” keyword rich copy on your pages so they can successfully classify your site. Use each keyword phrase numerous times within your copy for best results.

5. Create a killer Title tag. HTML title tags are critical because they’re given a lot of weight with all of the search engines. You must put your keywords into this tag and not waste space with extra words. Do not use the Title tag to display your company name or to say “Home Page.” Think of it more as a “Title Keyword Tag” and create it accordingly. Add your company name to the end of this tag, if you must use it.

6. Create Meaty Meta tags. Meta tags can be valuable, but they are not a magic bullet. Create a Meta Description tag that uses your keywords and also describes your site. The information in this tag often appears under your Title in the search engine results pages.

The Meta Keyword tag isn’t quite as important as the Meta Description tag. Contrary to popular belief, what you place in the keyword tag will have very little bearing on what keywords your site is actually found under, and it’s not given any consideration whatsoever by Google. Use this tag, but do not obsess over.

7. Use extra “goodies” to boost rankings. Things like headlines, image alt tags, header tags <H1><H2>, etc.), links from other pages, keywords in file names, and keywords in hyperlinks can cumulatively boost search engine rankings. Use any or all of these where they make sense for your site.

8. Be careful when submitting to directories such as Yahoo and the Open Directory Project (DMOZ). Having directory listings are a key component to getting your site spidered and listed by Google. Making mistakes in the submission process could cost you dearly as directory listings are difficult to change later in the game. Therefore, it’s important to read Yahoo’s How to Suggest Your Site and How to add a site to the Open Directory before submitting.

9. Don’t expect quick results. Getting high rankings takes time; there’s no getting around that fact. Once your site is added to a search engine or directory, its ranking may start out low and then slowly work its way up the ladder. Some search engines measure “click-through popularity,” i.e., the more people that click on a particular site, the higher its ranking will go. Be patient and give your site time to mature.

10. Don’t constantly “tweak” your site for better results. It’s best not to make changes to your optimization for at least three-to-six months after submission. It often takes the engines at least that long to add your optimized pages to their databases. Submit it, and then forget about it for a while!

If you’ve followed these tips and still can’t find your site in the engines, the first place to “tweak” would be your page copy. If you added less than 250 words of visible text on your pages, this is probably your culprit. Also, double check your keyword density, and make sure that you only targeted two or three phrases per page. Eventually, you’ll see the fruits of your labor with many top ten rankings in Google and the rest of the search engines!

META tags are hidden code read only by search engine webcrawlers (also called spiders). They live within the HEAD section of a web page. There are actually 4 very important META tags you need to worry about. Meta tags specifying who the author is and what the site is about really isn’t important to the search engines that matter the most (i.e.: Google). The META tags you need to be the most concerned about are:

1. robots
2. content-type
3. description
4. keywords

Sequencing of these tags may be extremely important. I say “may” because SEO is mostly hypothesis due to the changing algorithms of the search engines. Even though the W3C states that tag attributes do not have to be in any particular sequence, I’ve noticed a significant difference when I have the tags and attributes in the order described here. The only deviation from the list above is that the Title tag should come after content-type and before description.

The robots META tag tells the various search engine spiders whether or not you’d like them to crawl through your web page as well as where to start in their crawling activity. Top 10 SEO Tips wouldn’t be worthless without META robots, so long as you use a Robots.txt file. It’s not too hard to see why this tag can still be important. Here is the syntax:

<meta name=”robots” content=”index, follow” />

You can change the “index” to “noindex” and the “follow” to “nofollow” if you do not want your website to be indexed. Though, I have no idea why you wouldn’t want to be indexed.

Content-type is important to complex search engines like Google. This tag tells the spider what type of page you are posting, which helps the search engine categorize the listing. It also shows that you are following the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) guidelines, which could be an indication of a site being “optimized”. Here is the syntax used on this page:

<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=UTF-8″ />

The description META tag is the text that will be displayed under your title on the results page. See the OC Internet Advertising example above. There’s also a lot of controversy about the number of characters you should have in this tag. I’ve seen sites with a paragraph in their description listed in the top results, so I don’t think this tag has very much weight.

The Title and META tags should be different on every page of your website if you wish for most search engines to store and list them in the search results. Us SEO Expert’s have experimented with these two pieces of code to help us reach an accepted conclusion about how best to use them. Don’t click off this site until you’ve read the top 10 SEO tips below to see what I’ve discovered works best for search engine optimization.

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If your primary key phrase is html help make sure that the word html and help appear in your blog headers such as H1 and H2 tags as well as the title of each of your posts.

There was a time when the meta tags used to rule the roost of search engine placement. Put some keywords in the keywords meta tag, put a nice description in the description tag, and a nice title in the title tag, and you were almost done.

Not any more. In fact if you center your SEO efforts only around the meta tags, you not only get poorly ranked you also sometimes get penalised for using deceptive keywords and description (if that’s what you’re doing). The search engines these days give more importance to your actual content.

But it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use the meta tags at all. There are two tags that still make a difference and they are, the title tag and the description tag. And they are important because search engines like Google and Yahoo use your title as a hyperlink when your website appears on the search result pages and below this hyperlink appears the text that you have included in your description meta tag.

The title of your page should, must, contain the keywords that carry the essence of your page. They must have the keywords you think the search engine users will use to search for your website. Multiple studies have shown that people click those links more that contain the keywords and expressions they have just used as search terms.

Your description tag acts as an important nudge because it just appears beneath the hyperlink. Most users read your text description before clicking the link and a bad description can easily turn them off no matter how interesting and relevant your title sounds.

So is the keywords tag totally irrelevant? I don’t think so. There are many search engines, probably the smaller ones, that use this tag. I read somewhere that among the known search engines only perhaps Inktomi is using the keywords meta tag. The primary reason why all the major search engines stopped noticing the keywords meta tag was its exploitation. Keep this tag simple and put only those keywords there that are relevant to the particular page. Don’t use more than 9 keywords.

You don’t need to bother about a bunch of other tags used primarily for the SEO purpose. Just focus on the tags mentioned above in the following manner:

* Use 5-10 words in the title tag
* Use 9-12 keywords in your keywords tag
* Use around 160 characters, including spaces, in your description tag.