Perhaps the most important tag on a web site, as far as search engine rankings go, is the < Title > tag. This tag provides the description that appears at the top of the browser window in order to let an Internet user know where they are. Because this tag is also used as the official "Title" of your web site in most search engine results, it also provides one of your best chances to entice a web surfer to visit your site. For both search engine optimization and marketing purposes, the Title tag should be a richly-written, keyword dense sentence that accurately describes the content of that particular web page.

A common practice is to use the Title tag to list the name of the company or web site. Not only does this tell the visitor very little about the content of that particular page, it also does nothing to tell the spider what type of content your page contains. Each and every page of a web site should have a unique hand written title. The Title tag should be focused on describing the content of that particular web page in a keyword rich manner.

For example, the title "Joe's Sandwich Shack" for a deli in Manhattan is unlikely to be either informative to the casual surfer, or to deliver keyword rich text for the search engine to rank your site for. A much better title would be "New York City Deli Sandwiches & Desserts - Joe's Sandwich Shack" The new description not only provides keyword rich content to the spider, it also offers a much more detailed description to potential customers browsing through search results.

Meta 'Keyword' Tag

Once thought to be the golden key to high search engine rankings, the importance of the Meta Keyword tag has dropped dramatically over the last few years. Although most major engines no longer make use of the Meta Keyword tag, it is still worthwhile to include it for the smaller engines that do.

Using the same exact Meta Keyword on every page will get you nowhere. Each page should have a customized tag that reflects the content of that page. It's also important to remember that you should only be targeting a few phrases per page and that only those targeted phrases should be included in your tag. (Aim for 8-12 words total.)

There remains some level of debate on the use of commas within the Meta Keyword tag. I've found that leaving the commas out provides the most opportunity for multiple phrases with minimal words. Search engines will read a string of text and will break that string up into phrases as needed to provide search results.

Working off of our deli site above, let's consider that Joe wishes to optimize for the following phrases:

New York City Deli
Deli Sandwiches
Sandwiches & Desserts

If you planned to use commas in your Meta Keyword tag, you would need to structure the tag as follows:

< Meta Name="Keyword" Content ="New York City Deli, Deli Sandwiches, Sandwiches & Desserts ">

If you remove the commas and allow the search engines to break up the text as they see fit, you can cut three words out of your description, thus upping the keyword density within the tag. For example:

< Meta Name="Keyword" Content="New York City Deli Sandwiches & Desserts ">

It should be noted that several search engines are believed to penalize the rankings of sites that include irrelevant keywords within these tags. Even if this is not true, remember that adding the keyword "Brittany Spears" to a site about Jewish Genealogy is unlikely to either help out your rankings, or, to bring in targeted visitors.

Meta 'Site Description' Tag

Although it has fallen out of favor, much like the Meta Keywords tag, the Meta Description Tag still holds some sway over the major search engines. When used by the engines, this text is usually the basis for the description of the site on search engine results pages. A proper Meta Description tag should provide a brief, accurate, keyword rich description of the site's content.

Again, building on Joe's deli site, a proper description should look something like this:

< META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT=" New York City Deli specializing in mile-high sandwiches, freshly prepared desserts, and other kosher treats." >

Note that no search engine will display more than 250 characters of the Meta Description tag, so it's best to keep this one brief and to the point. One of the best ways to go about crafting this tag is to create the description that you will be submitting to the major directories and then use that for your Meta Description as well.

Use the Heading Tags

Search engine algorithms are designed to take advantage of properly built sites. This includes the use of the heading tags to denote headline or other important text on a web page. Most engines give some boost to text found within the headline tags of a page. For this reason, it is essential to make use of the < hx > tags on optimized pages.

It is important not to overuse this tag, but applying the < h1 > tag to the most important text on your page and smaller header tags like < h2 > and < h3 > to section headers, caption text, etc... is good SEO practice. If the standard font size denoted by the header tags is too large for your design, you can make use of style sheets to redefine the size, color and font of the < hx > tags.

Use of 'ALT' Tags

Search engines are unable to view graphics or distinguish text that might be contained within them. For this reason, most engines will read the content of the image ALT tags to determine the purpose of a graphic. By taking the time to craft relevant, yet keyword rich ALT tags for the images on your web site, you increase the keyword density of your site.

Although many search engines will read and index the text contained within ALT tags, it's important NOT to go overboard in using these tags as part of your SEO campaign. Most engines will not give this text any more weight than the text within the body of your site.

Beware of adding single pixel .gif files to your web site for the sole purpose of stuffing keywords into the ALT tags. Search engine spiders are aware of this trick and are able to detect and penalize sites that utilize it.

In addition to this, many browsers that have been created for the visually impaired read the text of ALT tags as part of the content of the page. You can imagine the resulting usability issues for a site that has stuffed excessive keywords into the ALT tags.

Using Links (the 'A' Tag)

Links are an essential tool of search engine optimization. As more and more search engines adopt link popularity as an important aspect of their ranking algorithm, they also work to increase their ability to determine the value of links. By carefully crafting the text that you use to link internally and externally as well as any text that might accompany a link request, you can have a significant impact on the optimization of your web site.

Including keyword phrases in linked text helps improve not only the keyword density of your page, it also helps boost the relevancy of the page you are linking to. Search engines read and index the text used to describe a link and apply that text toward both the linker and the linkee's ranking.

For this reason, using your keywords in a link like so:

About Web Search

is much more effective than simply making the URL (which rarely contain keywords) the link text, as shown here:

http://websearch.about.com

In addition, some search engines will read and index the content of the title tag within an < a href > tag. Apart from the SEO value, this feature provides added usefulness for site visitors as the title tag is used to give further detail about the page or content that a link refers to.