Optimal Meta Tags
Meta tags are used by spiders in order to get the relevent information about your site. These mainly include Title, Description, Keywords and Robots Tags. The Description and Keyword tags are not as Important as the Title Tag.
The Title tag is a main factor in rankings for some search engines, especially MSN. It is Important to have your main keywords in their, with a good density. Say your keyword was seo, a good title is "seo tips at seo solutions". This would give my keyword of seo a good density of 40% . It is a must to include your main keywords in your title, as this plays a big part in rankings for that keyword.
The Description tag is used to describe your page with a summary. As with the title, it is a must to include your main keywords in this tag. Many search engines use this tag to help categorise your site when indexing. A good description tag will have no more than 220 characters and no more than 22 words. A good range to go by is 190 - 220 characters and 12 - 22 words. This seems to be a good range for the major search engines.
The Keyword Tag is also important when getting your site categorised. It is of major importance to list your main keywords to your page first in the list as most wieght goes to these few keywords. It is very important to have keywords that are represented on your page, and not include keywords that are not on your page. Some webmasters however, say that using spelling mistakes of your main keywords and also other words of the same meaning may help. As long as your main keywords are first in the list, I dont see how it could hurt. A good rage of keywords which can be used in the tag is 12 - 28.
How do we write meta tags? Well, it is simply by using the following bit of html in your header section.
<TITLE>The Title Of This Page</TITLE>
<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="The Description">
<META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="Keywords">
<META NAME="Robots" CONTENT="index,follow">
Do I use the same for all pages? This is a big no no.. You must change all the tags to suit all your pages as all your pages are different. If you fail to change your tags for each page, you will risk losing rankings in your inner pages.