SEO Tip#1 - Tags

Title tags are extremely important when it comes to optimizing your site for the search engines and is an important factor in determining your ranking. Your page should have a TITLE tag and it should contain your search term(s). Inserting your keywords into this tag is what you are looking to achieve. The

Another rule to keep in mind is that your title tag should be short (usually 6 to 7 words at the most) and placing your keyword(s) near the beginning is the concept to use as you are designing your web site.  The recommended maximum number of characters within your title tag should not exceed 150. Anything over 150 characters in your title tag can render your page not "robot friendly". It also carries a lot of weight in the overall scheme of things and on a scale of +3 to -3, title tags carry a +3. Need I say more

SEO Tip #2 - Keywords in the URL

Keywords contained in your URL (Uniform Resource Locater) is also another item that carries a lot of weight with the Search Engines. On our sliding scale of +3 to -3, keywords in the URL come in at a strong +3. So that means if you can happen to get a domain name with your searched keywords, the better your ranking with the search engines and getting your web site optimized. Take for instance this domain name: http://www.freesearchengineoptimizationtips.com - it has all of the main keyword terms that will help whenever someone searches for any of the following keywords: search - engine - optimization - tips - free and that is not counting the keyword phrases that may be searched for as well.

Another factor of getting your keywords into your URL is by naming your sub files or pages with important keywords that you are trying to optimize for in the content for that particular page. For instance: http://www.freesearchengineoptimizationtips.com/urlkeywords.html where "urlkeywords" is the keyword phrase that you are attempting to rank well for. Now also keep in mind that you need to have the keywords in other parts of the document or just relying on them in your URL will not be effective. Having a URL that includes the keyword alone doesn't help, but it helps when other sites link to you and lot of people link to others by their URL, thus the anchor text will use the keyword, and in the end that would help.

There are also some rumors that by having your keywords in your URL can also potentially help in your click through rate. My guess would be that the reason for that is that it makes the site look more relevant to your particular keyword search term.

Overall, just having a keyword rich domain name is not going to catapult you to the top ten, but in the big picture, it will help in branding your image and when combined with other SEO techniques, it does matter.

SEO Tip#3 - The META Tags

Ahhh...to META or not to META that is the question? Or in the words of my friend from Italy, "Whats the META you?"

OK, enough of the puns. Really, META tags are not what they used to be. Now that doesn't mean that they are not important, but it means they don't carry as much weight with the search engines as they used to. Again, on our scale of +3 to -3, META tags come in at a +1. So, a point is a point and in the search engine optimization game, it all adds up. Three out of four tags that that I review here all carry a +1, the last one (the dreaded tag) gets a -1.

Let's take a look then at some of the META tags and what you can and can not do to optimize your web site. First one up, the tag. Use this tag to write a description of your site. Now even though Google really doesn't factor in META tags anymore, MSN and Yahoo still use META tags extensively. The other advantage to the tag is that some search engines will use that content as a description of your site in the search results that are displayed to the end user. The other rule that you want to be aware of is to try and keep your description to a 150 characters or less. Two reasons for that: first, if your description has to many characters it will not be considered a "robot friendly" web page. The other reason is that anything over that 150 character limit may get truncated by the search engine and in that case it would not display in the search results.

One last point, you also would want to try and strategically pepper your description with your main keywords as well. Just remember to write your description for humans and not just for the search engines.

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