Search engine optimization, better known as SEO, is one of the most important steps in creating, maintaining, and promoting an effective and popular website. Instead of spending thousands of dollars on advertising and promotional materials, you can optimize your site for search and enjoy the organic benefits of search traffic for free. What many website owners do not know, however, is all that goes into effective SEO that makes a real impact on page rankings.

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 two different kinds of meta tags that have a high impact on SEO. Take, for our first example, the META KEYWORDS tag. This meta tag enumerates keywords to spiders, informing them what the website is all about. If you visit www.nytimes.com and right click on the page, and then click on "View Source," you will encounter 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, people, regional news, national news?" and so on. This keyword list includes dozens of words that relate to the New York Times but also to newspapers in general.

Most search engines detect these keywords in content, too, but it can be helpful for you to include keywords that are especially low-density in text, such as odd spellings of names and places, related topics not specifically discussed on the page, and any other keywords you have trouble injecting into your content in a user-friendly way.

Another important tag is the META DESCRIPTION tag. This tag is used by the engines to present information about your website when it appears in search results. Most engines allow 160 characters here, and this is a place you can include keywords to boost your page rankings for targeted phrases.

There are also other meta tags, but these two are vital for SEO. It is important that you maximize your use of META KEYWORDS and META DESCRIPTION tags by making sure you do not cram them with words unrelated to your content or use the same keywords too many total times on the same page. Putting in too many keywords will cause the search engines to penalize your pages as spam. Not using enough keywords is almost as bad.

Finally, be sure you use different meta tags for every page. It is useful to target tags to the content included on a particular page. If you repeat meta tags throughout your site, you will not benefit from valuable differences in keywords on particular pages.