Seach Engine Optimization

Meta Tags

Title Tag - Always use a title tag for each page. The title tag should represent the subject matter of the page.

Good title tag:

<TITLE>Search Engine Optimization</TITLE>

Not so good title tag:

<TITLE>SEO.com - Search engine optimization tips, tricks, news, resources, tools and much more besides!</TITLE>

Header Tag - Many of the major search engines place a lot of relevance on keywords in header tags (H1, H2 and H3). As such I recommend that you sprinkle keyword rich header tags on your Web pages.

Sample header tags:

<H1>Search Engine Optimization</H1>

<H2>Search Engine Positioning</H2>

Meta Description Tag - The contents of meta description tags are indexed by some search engines as the page description in its search engine results.

However, meta description tags is often misused, with misleading or even false descriptions about a page. As a result, the relevancy of search results are often compromised, so search engines have begun to de-emphasize the importance and even totally ignore the contents of the tag.

Some search engines, such as AltaVista and Inktomi, do still index the contents of a meta description tag for its search results. But if the meta description tag is missing, the search engine will usually extract a description from the body text.

In general, search engines will index the first 135-249 characters of the meta description tag contents. Write a description that sells the page.

Include the most important keywords at the beginning of the tag. But, don't just fill the description tag with keywords.