THE "DESCRIPTION" META TAG HAS MESSAGES FOR SEARCH ENGINES AND WEBSITE VISITORS ALIKE

The description will commonly expand on the brief "headline" presented by the title. Not only will the information in this tag be of value in helping a search engine determine placement of your website within search results, but the description contained in this tag is normally shown along with the title when the search engine shows the returns for a search.

Failure to provide a description may not only make it more difficult to obtain good placement within returns, but it is likely that in the absence of a description, the search engine will simply grab the first few words it sees on your page, and that may be what the viewer reads as a description of your website.

It is a good idea to repeat your keywords in the description, but don't beat it to death. Also, most search engines will only display the first 20 or so words of the description, so don't get too wordy up front. Say what you have to say and get it over with. The description should not exceed 150-200 characters.

THE "KEYWORDS" TAG IS FADING IN VALUE, BUT....

It used to be that search engines wanted YOU to list the important keywords in your website. These days, the programs used by the search engines generally extract the pertinent and relevant keywords from the content of the page itself and ignore the keyword tag completely. Many website designers have gone so far as to drop this tag. I and others leave it in for three basic reasons; we are used to using it, there may be a search engine somewhere that still uses it and why miss out, and in some cases where relevant keywords cannot be picked up from context, the keyword tag may be the coin toss that decides the issue. How valid these arguments are, I have no way of knowing, but it is just as easy to put in a keyword tag as not. Simply list your keywords, separated by commas.

THE "REVISIT" TAG SAYS "YA'LL COME BACK, NOW, YA'LL HEAR?"

While not specifically a search engine optimization item, the "revisit" tag may help provide more website traffic. The "revisit" tag tells a search engine spider to return in so many days to reindex the site. This can be of great importance with a site that updates data regularly, but might only get indexed by the search engines at longer intervals.

I have heard and read that when some search engines revisit a site, the site tends to rise in placement level. I have not been able to find a definitive statement on this, but have noticed a rise in visits to, and sales from, some of my sites that seems to follow the cycle of reindexing.

CONTENT IS KING!

This statement has been around for a while. Though it might be debated and there are certainly exceptions, generally having a website full of valuable content is one of the best ways to make search engines and people happy. The search engines have something to sink their teeth into, and can extract a lot more data from the content than you possibly could tell them in the title and tags. I very often find search engines sending visitors to my sites who have searched on a term I never even thought of as a keyword.