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 different kinds of meta tags that impact SEO. Take, for instance, the META KEYWORDS tag. This meta tag provides a list of keywords to spiders, telling them what the website is all about. If you visit NYTimes.com and right click on the page, and then click on “View Page Source,” you will find 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, national news?” and so on. The keyword list contains dozens of words that relate to this particular paper but also to papers in general.

Most search engines also detect these keywords in page content, but it is helpful to include in a tag keywords that are especially low-density in text, such as unusual spellings of names and places, related topics not specifically mentioned on the page, and any other keywords it is difficult to inject into the text 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 many other meta tags, but these two tags are the most vital to SEO. Optimize your use of META KEYWORDS and META DESCRIPTION tags by making sure you do not cram them overfull of words that not related to your content. Always be aware that too many keywords here, like too many keywords in your content, will cause the search engines to mark your pages as spam.

Finally, be sure to use different meta tags on every page. You should target tags to the content included on that particular page. If you repeat meta tags through your site, you will not benefit from valuable differences in keywords on particular pages.