<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="Page description goes here">
<META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="keyword phrase1, phrase2">I cover META tags in another section so I will not deal with that here. What the engine's do with this information varies. Google will ignore your meta keyword list and sometimes your meta description. It prefers to determine things for itself from the main body of the web page layout. That's why you can see strange titles & descriptions on Google's result pages. Many other engine's still use the Title, Description and Keyword tags. It's the reason why they still need to be included in a layout. It's worth mentioning here that it's important the Title tag's the first tag at the top of the web page layout, some search engine's get confused if they can't find it first. The title should also include a main keyword phrase as close to the beginning of the title as possible. The "Prominence" (how close to the start of a title) of a keyword phrase is one of the many indicators to a search engine spider as to what the web page layout is about. If you think about it, that makes sense. If your keyword phrase appears in the title it's a good indication that's what the web page content's about so that's why a 'spider' looks at it. Of course, the title still needs to make sense to a human visitor and be interesting enough to click on when it appears in query results. This is one of those not always easy to get right tasks. The Description should confirm what the title says to the 'spider'. In other words it expects to see confirmation the description matches the title. You need to add your chosen main keyword phrase as close to the beginning of the description as possible to gain prominence. The description also needs to indicate to a human visitor what the web page is about and attractive enough they would want to click on it when it appears in an engine's results to a search term. This can be a task that's NOT easy to get right. Thirdly we've the META Keyword tag where you include your main keyword phrase1 then your second phrase2 plus any other variations of them you've researched that could attract your targeted traffic. This is covered in some detail in the various Keyword sections. Put your most important keyword phrase as the first one in the meta tag, your second most important in the 2nd position etc. There's some debate as to whether to separate them by commas or not. Whilst some engine's may not care I prefer to use commas. The next important area to the 'spider' is the main body of the web page layout between the <BODY></BODY> tags. It's looking at text in particular html tags. One of the more important ones is the headline text. Like the invisible Title in the head of the web page layout, the visible headline in the body of the page must include your main keyword phrase. Your keyword phrase should have as much prominence as you can give it, whilst still making sense to a human reader. The main headline tag is the h1 tag: <h1>Headline goes here</h1> For sub headings use the h2 tag <h2>Sub-heading goes here</h2>. As these tags produce the biggest visual headlines in a web page layout it tells the search engine these headlines must be important because you've made them so visually prominent in the web page layout. To the human visitor of course these headlines will be huge and probably not very attractive. One way around this problem is to use a cascading style sheet, CSS. This will control the size of the visual heading for the human viewer, but the search engine reads the code on the web page layout as h1 or h2. If you know nothing about CSS, don't worry its quite easy to apply and we'll cover that later. CSS also has many other uses for the search engine optimizer, as you will see. Next: Web page layout for the search engine visitor - Part 2 | 
