5. Meta tags – In the early days of the Web, meta tags – coding that describes the content of a page using keywords and descriptions that are not visible to the visitor – were the primary method used by search engines to rank websites. While their usefulness has diminished as more sophisticated methodologies took hold, they still play and important part in getting your site cataloged.

The keywords tag should contain a list of keywords relevant to your site, separated by commas.

The keywords tag should not exceed 1,024 characters, including the commas and spaces between words.

The second tag is the Description. It is a sentence that summarizes the page’s content.
The description tag should not be more than 250 characters long including spaces. Don’t use your competitor’s name or registered trademarks in your meta tags. This is illegal and you’ll be hearing from attorneys instead of customers.

6. Alt tags – This is an underutilized strategy for improving rankings. Alt tags are intended to be used as text descriptions of images. In the old days, many browsers didn’t have the capability to load images so the alt tags were used to describe what the image was. Nowadays, they can be used to improve rankings by including keyword related to your site. But be creative. The alt tag should use keywords that describe the image as well. That’s because those with site impairments use text readers to read a page aloud. You don’t want the alt tags to create any confusion.

7. Spamming search engines – Be sure that you avoid certain activities which are considered to be spam techniques. Search engines are much better at identifying tricks used by professional SEO companies and spammers. This includes making text the same color as the background (so search engines catalog them while they remain invisible to the visitor because they blend into the background) or creating identical pages with different names to increase the breadth of a small site. Using keywords that don’t relate to your subject matter can also get you blacklisted from search engines.

8. Lag time – Finally, don’t get carried away with reworking your keywords and pages. All of the major search engines are backlogged and even if you manually add your site to their system, it can be 4 to 6 weeks before any changes occur in the rankings. Have patience and resist the temptation to constantly change your keywords and bombard the search engine with your web address. This will not only get you blacklisted, but you may miss a keyword combination that pops you to the top of the search engines because you couldn’t resist over managing the search engine optimization process.