Search Engines or Directories are the most important way that surfers come to your site. This is not beyond your control. There are ways to make your site more attractive to those Search Engines. One of those ways is through the use of Meta Tags. They are easy to create and if used appropriately they can dramatically improve your Web sites traffic.

Meta tags or meta information describes what is to be found "on" the documents/Web site, not what is found at your business. You need to create information that is understandable, accurate and can be indexed properly by Web agents. Your job is to provide these clues for Search Engines and in doing so giving them the necessary information about what will be found there.

Meta tags are not displayed in a browser. They are for recording information about your site by Search Engines or Spiders. Not all of these Web agents (search engines/directories) use meta tags. Some choose instead to display the first few sentences of your site as the query, and only use the tag for indexing purposes.

• The title of a Web sites home page is very important. The title is used in search engines and directories as well as in a browsers history lists and bookmarks/favorite places. It is actually required in HTML 4.0. Most search engines record the title of the URL and use that quite heavily in search results.
• The title is the first piece of information that a search engine will find. In order to focus on a search/query, since it can't think like a human (using thought, reason or intelligence), it follows a set of rules. These rules have a great deal to do with location and frequency of keywords on a web page. A Web page with a keyword in the title is considered more relevant. This helps with ranking too, when keywords appear higher on the page.
• The title should be short and descriptive and it should be from five to fifteen words. If a title is too short it can appear to a search engine as having "no title" tag, but if it is too long it can disqualify it from being used or from being indexed at all.
• The title should identify the site, then allow the description tag to summarize it.
• An example of a bad title is: Home or Home Page or Welcome to. This does nothing for the site nor the search engine attempting to index the relevancy. Just tell what technology your company supports and produces products for. In this short sentence be sure to use some keywords.
• In many of the articles I've come across that talk about submitting URL's, they say that when ever possible take advantage of the title on the submit form by writing until you fill it up. I disagree as it is a good way to either not be included or to make your listing look very unprofessional. Take the higher road, be reasonable. If you can list more than the company name, confine your submit title to ten words, no more than 15 maximum. Don't make it a long string of keywords either.
• In addition to having your home page titled consider having all pages title/keyword/description so to speak. Quite a few search engines and directories allow for several URL's to be submitted but in order for them to stand on their own they need to be indexed and without proper identification they simply fall through the cracks. Also design them to provide relevant content not just repeated information from your home page.
• One last thought, most search engines display the title of the page in queried results. So if all your pages are titled you will give the "surfer" more choices to choose from. Maybe your home page didn't catch their eye but one of your others might!

• For most technology Web sites the keywords should be product types or styles. Or a type of generic product name that all your competitors will use. The tag should be tightly focused as to not encourage unwanted traffic.
• One of the most important things you can do is to study your referrer logs and see what phrases your traffic is coming in on. What common groupings of words do they seem to use? Take the most common of the two and three phrases and use those as your keywords and try to incorporate them in a natural manner on your Web site.
• In general the accepted amount should be under 1000 characters this includes spaces and commas. By leaving out either commas or spaces, more space is gained. Which will provide better use of your limited characters. The official specs say only that elements should be separated by commas. This squeezes more out of keywords. The search engines say you don't need commas and by leaving them out they could also be seen as phrases not just as unrelated words. This will maximize your keyword potential.
• After the list is done, add the letter "s" to the end of every word. Many searchers use plurals to search by and most search engines will offer both the singular and plural results from the query.
• All the reports I've found agree - leave out the common words. If the words are too common when a query is done the searcher will get a huge number of results and it is much more likely that yours will be at the bottom.
• Also, don't steal your competitors list of keywords nor add a list of your competitors names as keywords! This is not only dishonest but can actually get you banned from a Search Engine or Directory if someone chooses to report you. Lawsuits are made of stuff like this and it's not worth it.
• Misspelled words are often used. If product types are commonly misspelled then they could be included. If your product has trickey spelling by all means use variations of the different ways searchers have spelled it or should I say misspell it? Within reason of course.
• Don't capitalize keywords. Stick to lower case, practically everyone searches in lower case. Only about 10% of any searches are done using a cap on the first letter.

• The use of a Meta description tag for a summary of the page is the best way to get indexed by most search engines. Otherwise they will index the top 200 words on your page. This is important because when a prospective viewer does a query, a list of matches appears and each will have a little summary of the page's content.
• This doesn't need to be of great length and it may or may not contain keywords. It doesn't need to, but you do need to make it sound appealing to the viewer. That is how you get them to click on your listing and enter your site.
• There is a debate over how many characters to use but the ball park figure seems to be 150, or 25 words. Keep the description to what is on your Web page, not what your company does in general. The whole point of this summary is to entice them in to taking a look at your site. Then if they do enter at that point you can tell them everything about your company.
• This bears repeating: the summary should draw the viewer into clicking on the link! It should be telling the viewer what they will find when they get there. Be enticing but truthful!

• I've found that many search engines index additional information about a site by using the ALT attribute tag. While the image or graphic is loading the ALT text provides "alternative text" to be viewed. It is the type of text that when you roll your mouse across it while the graphic is loading, the message will be displayed.
• You can create text that will appear if the image for whatever reason does not load properly. Also this is used for browsers that do not support images like Lynx or for "surfers" who turn graphics off so that they can have pages load faster.
• This is a great place to put keywords or a company name or slogan. It's not spamming but is a creative way to use keywords throughout the page.
• If an icon needs to be clicked for navigation purposes here is another way to be sure your viewer will see it, or a search engine to travel through it to index the rest of your site. The only way the search engine can go further is to provide the ALT, as search engines do not understand, read, or interpret graphics. This is why some pages never show up in queries from search engines while every page from other companies will. My conclusion is it is best to use the ALT attribute as it can only help your site.

• Another forgotten item on a Web page is the e-mail address. I went to a friends newest Web site to take a look since he wanted a couple of tips and pointers. I decided to e-mail him some positive feedback on his site. I had downloaded his page and printed it out but no e-mail address! I had to get back online to find his e-mail address since he had only given me the URL.
• In the middle of his site was his business card so to speak with his important info: address, phone number, etc... but no e-mail address. I only had his phone number so I found this to be very frustrating. When I did I found it, it was buried in some information on the left hand side of his site and I had to click on a button to display it!
• Very frustrating and quite frankly stupid. On every piece of literature he has ever given me his e-mail address is prominently displayed and yet it wasn't on his Web sites home page, I had to hunt for it. What if I had been a customer?
• Another time I wanted to contact a friend about some important information which I found and he needed. I didn't have his e-mail address but did know his Web site URL so I went there to find it. Believe it or not, no e-mail address was there or at least readily available. I clicked on the button which said "contact info" and got his address, phone number, etc.. but no e-mail address. I was shocked at how stupid it was. I finally figured out it was on the spinning orb which had nothing to do with his site or business!
• Why make customer contact so hard? Don't be so foolish, it's not a secret or a scavenger hunt, place your e-mail address on every page and display it without making anyone work to get to it.
• You should offer visitors to your Web site an easy way to contact you. Your mailing address, phone number and e-mail address should appear on every page of your site. Remember too that e-mail is cheaper than a long distance phone call and if your visitors are in different time zones this is an easier solution for that contact.