Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of every web designer’s key steps in creating, maintaining, and promoting a valuable high-traffic website. Freeing you from the necessity of spending thousands of your dollars on promotion advertising, search engine optimization enables you to grow your traffic organically as your page rankings rise. What many web designers only learn after years of experience, however, is the powerful difference meta tags can make in how your pages rank.

No aspect of SEO is more frequently overlooked than making sure that meta tags are used on every page. Meta tags, which are invisible to visitors, give the search engines specific identifiers for the page. Many site owners never implement them to full effect.

There are two different kinds of meta tags that have a high impact on SEO. Take, for our first example, the META KEYWORDS tag. This meta tag enumerates keywords to spiders, informing them what the website is all about. If you visit www.nytimes.com and right click on the page, and then click on “View Source,” you will encounter a meta tag about half down the first page reading META KEYWORDS. This tag will show you a long list of keywords starting with “New York Times, international news, daily newspaper, people, regional news, national news?” and so on. This keyword list includes dozens of words that relate to the New York Times but also to newspapers in general.

Most search engines pick up these keywords from content, too, but it can help to include keywords that are little-used in text, especially odd spellings of names and places, related topics, and anything else you have trouble placing in your content in a user-friendly way.

The second critical meta tag is the META DESCRIPTION tag. Search engines use this tag to display information about your site when in search results. Most search engines allow 160 characters in this meta tag. The META DESCRIPTION tag is also a place you may include keywords that boost your page rankings for targeted phrases.

There are other meta tags, but these two are the most vital to effective SEO. It is critical that you maximize your use of META KEYWORDS and META DESCRIPTION tags by making sure you do not stuff them full of words not related to your content. And, of course, it is important not to use the same keywords too many total times on the same page. Excessive keyword density, like putting in too many keywords on a page, will cause the search engines to mark your pages as spam.

Finally, always different meta tags for every page. Changing the meta tags throughout your site makes it possible for the search engines to detect valuable differences in keywords on particular pages.