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Imagine this: you are the new and proud owner of a company that specializes in data recovery. You've handed your business card and various company stationery to at least 650 people, and they can easily find your website because they've got it in black-and-white. Fantastic! You've also established some back-links to your website via some hairdresser friends of yours. Web users landing on the hairdressing pages sometimes ends up on your site, thinking "how the hell did I get here"? Horrific!

I'm astound at the amount of clients' websites that do not have any meta tags. You see there are various ways that people can find you, but at the end of the day you want to be found for the right reason(s). You want to attract people to your website because they are in need of 'data recovery', not a rare hair product.

Meta tags are keywords found in the 'header' (top) HTML code of your web page(s). It is those words web users type into the search box of Search Engines (SEs) to find your site. And it is those text (keywords) they see on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) when you get ranked along with your competitors. The question is will they click on it or not? In order to get listed on a SERP, or ranked, your website's pages need to be crawled and indexed by web spiders (aka web crawlers, 'bots'), and note that they do this task per individual page.

So you might have submitted your website to one of the major SEs. Next, a web spider comes and visits your site, or rather a page (not always the home page) on your site. The 'header' is the first bit of HTML code the spider will munch on, and index. Sim-salla-bim now that the spider has found your page and indexed it, it is listed and more easily discovered on the world-wide-web. Sit back and kick those shoes off! Not really, it is copied and stored on the SEs central database for indexing at a later date, anything from two to three months. So you agree then with me that an attitude of doing it once and thorough might not be a bad idea?

All credit to web spiders for doing a good job, but inherently they are dumb little creatures, they like munching on basic HTML code, thus will ignore fancy Javascript, images (unless there are alt-tags), flash-only pages, forms, etc. So when the SE processes your site's data in their database, eventually, they run an algorithm (mathematical formula) against the content of your sites' page(s). Meaning assigning a value to the amount of times keywords gets repeated (keyword density) in comparison to the total amount of text (content), based on the code surrounding these keywords. It sounds and is pretty complicated. But as long as you work a page's keywords into that page's content sensibly, and it does not look like the subtitles of a pirate DVD, Bob's your uncle. O yes, do not repeat the keywords

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