Relevant meta tags are:
META NAME="TITLE" CONTENT="

When a search engine's spider crawls your homepage, it finds keywords in the title tag. It also finds these same keywords liberally sprinkled throughout the content (text) on the page. This effectively "links" the keywords and the key phrase in the title meta tag to the content on the page. This "linking" provides a very high level of "relevance" for your site when someone visits a search engine and performs a search on one of my keywords, helping your site rank highly in the search results for those keywords or key phrases.

META NAME="Description" CONTENT="
The description meta tag contains each of your keywords and your key phrase. This is extremely important because it ties in with the title meta tag and the content on the page.

When other websites link to yours (also a very important factor for a high search engine ranking), they link to your site using link "anchor text". The link anchor text is easily recognizable as the "clickable" part of the link.

By providing the other webmaster with specific anchor text that includes your keywords, that anchor text will tie in seamlessly with your page's meta tags and keyword-rich content. This makes for a very well optimized web page for search engine ranking purposes. Proper meta tags coupled with effective linking strategies form the backbone of a good site optimization plan.

Also a regular updated news section, will benefit your ranking on some search engines, as spiders check how often your site gets updated with new information.

After that all you can do is wait

Good stuff. I know that there's many other places on the web w/ info like this, but usually it's included in HTML lessons. Breaking it out seperately can help people immensely.

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Even though I include meta tags (description and keywords) in most of my webpages - they aren't that relevant to optimizing for major search engines. I usually add them in as a token gesture.

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---content is much more important as well as links to your site.

Absolutely agree.

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Hello pcx,

Surely you mean the <title>Your page title here</title> tag instead?

Same here.

I was under the impression that Google did not even look at meta tags. Just got the keywords from the page body. Could be wrong though.

Peter
www.attentiongrabbers.co.uk

I think you're right. I just read an article the other day that talked about companies that guarantee a top-10 placement in Google and one of the things mentioned is they place hidden text inside the body of the page related to what Google may be looking for. It didn't elaborate as to how it's hidden though.

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