Meta Tag Optimization

The most important information on your web page is your title. This is the first thing that is read by the search engine spiders. Many search engines display your title as the text when your web site is listed. Many people make the mistake of using a poorly written title or a non-relevant title. The major search engines like Google give keywords used in your title higher relevancy when ranking your web page.

People optimize their web site for certain search words called keywords. But a common mistake is the search engine keywords the web site is optimized for are the wrong search words. What I mean is the search engine keyword may be too broad therefore creating too much competition for the top ranking. Or the search engine keyword chosen just does not get requested enough times to produce any traffic. So in choosing your search engine keywords, make sure you do research on the number of times that search word is requested per month and how much competition is there for that keyword in the search engine. Two tools that will help with this is WordTracker.com and Overture.com. They both will help determine the popularity of a keyword or search engine keyword phrase.

Secondly, you must use a short, yet descriptive description meta tag : using a long run on sentence, or stuffing your description with keywords, may create a serious problem with your search engine optimization strategy.
Aim to use a simple 8-10 word "tagline" , or two short descriptive sentences, with only one or two instances of your top keyword.

The third common error in search engine optimization is placing too many search engine keywords in the keyword meta tag. In the beginning days of search engines, this meta tag meant something. Now many if the major search engines don't even index this meta tag. And the ones that do, may penalize your search engine position for using wrong keywords. Basically, if you are truly targeting a certain keyword, it will be in your title, description and content of your page. These search engine keywords are the ones to include in the keyword meta tag.