Tips for Making Your Pages Search Engine Friendly

As with many other things which are unseen, there is a lot of unnecessary mystery surrounding the use of meta-tags on web pages. The meta tags are information packets in the head portion of a web page.

Though there are several possible meta tags that may be included in the head of a web page, the ones which are most important for search engine optimization are the Title Tag, the Description tag and the Keywords tag.

The title tag is really one of the most important single things you can work on for improving your website's search engine results. Go to Google and make a search for any particular key word If you look at the top ten entries in that search you will see that all of them have this key word in the title, sometimes more than once. So when writing your title tag, it is helpful to have your keywords included in the title tag, and not only in the tag, near the beginning of the title.

Some guidelines for the title tag suggest that this tag be limited to 70-80 characters including spaces. I confess to have used more on several occasions.
The next tag that has to be done is the Description tag. Many search engines use the description tag as a way to tell the searchers what the page is about. On MSN, for example, the description of the site shown underneath the title is the description that has been placed in the description tag.


The description tag is thus important in two respects: the search engine robot searches it for keywords to "get an idea" of what the page is about, and this tag will be seen by the surfers as they scroll down through the search results. If it is an interesting and well-written description then they may click through to visit the site. So this tag should be well written but also contain the important keywords that you wish to highlight.


The last of the important meta tags relevant to search engine optimization is the keywords tag. In this tag you have a chance to list your important keywords, but this time they do not have to be in a coherent phrase as in the Title and Description. Put your important keywords near the beginning. Make sure that all the keywords used in the title and the description tags are again listed. On top of that, add prominent keywords, especially those that appear in the actual text of the page you are optimizing.