Take a look at the elements and resources surrounding Metatags and Content and how search engines value them.

Importace of Metatags

• Metatag keywords : The 'keywords' metatag also counts, as like other metatags it usually gets minimal attention from Google. It does seem to get importance from MSN and Yahoo! The keywords metatag content must be kept reasonable 10 to 25 keywords at most. Don't cram the keywords tag with words that you don't even have on the page content.




• Metatag description : Metatags are getting really less attention day by day but there are metatags that still matter and should be used. These are the metatags 'description' and 'keywords'. Use the 'description' metatag to write the description of your site. Besides the fact that metatags still carry quite a bit of weight on MSN and Yahoo!, the 'description' metatag has one more advantage , it usually pops in the description of your site in search results.




• Metatag language : If your site is language specific, don't leave this tag empty. Search engines have other sophisticated ways of determining the language of a page, but the 'language' metatag is still considered.



• Metatag refresh : The 'refresh' metatag is one way to redirect visitors from your site or webpage to another. Only consider this if you have recently migrated your site to a new domain and you need to temporarily redirect visitors. When used for an extended period, the 'refresh' metatag is regarded as unethical practice and this can hurt your ratings. Redirecting through .htaccess or similiar 301 is much better.

Importance of Content

• Frequency of content change : Frequent changes are favored. It is great when you constantly add new content. Making small updates to exisiting content is still positive, but is only minimally scored.



• Unique content : Having more content (relevant content, which is different from the content on other sites both in wording and topics) can be a real boost for your site's rankings.



• Keywords font size : When a keyword in the document text is a larger font size in comparison to other on-page text, this makes it more noticeable. It is therefore usually considered more important than the rest of the text. The same applies to headings which are usually in larger font size than the rest of the text.



• Keywords formatting : Bold or Strong and italic are another way to emphasize important words and phrases. However, use bold, italic and larger font sizes within reason because you might achieve just the opposite effect.



• Content separation : From a marketing point of view content separation (based on IP, browser type, etc.) might be great for visitors, but for SEO it is bad. When you have one URL containg differing content, search engines can get confused as to what the actual content of the page is.



• Illegal content : Using other copyrighted content without permission or using content that promotes illegal, banned, or questionable content can get you kicked out of search engines.



• Invisible text : This is a black hat SEO practice and when spiders discover that you have text specially for them but not for humans, don't be surprised by the penalty.



• Duplicate content : When you have the same content on several pages on your site ,on the outside your site may appear to be larger. And that is when you have to pay for the duplicate content. To a lesser degree duplicate content typically applies to pages that reside on other sites.