Why aren’t you listed?

Every week I meet people that complain that their website isn't at the top of the search engines, and I usually point them to www.nikkipilkington.com to learn about the things they can do for free.

Then I go and look at their website to see what's going on there.

Invariably I find 3 things:

1) They have no META tags
These are tags within the first few lines of code on a website that help most of the search engines (not all) work out what to do with your site, how to display your description and various other things. At the very least, you should have a META description and a META keywords tag. Check for yours by going to your site then going to View –> Source in your browser. No META tags? Fix it!

2) The META tags are full of spam.
By this I mean that key words and phrases are repeated ad nauseum in the hope of beating competitors to the top. If one word is repeated in your META tags 50 times, that's spam. 10 times is spam. Some search engines see 5 times as spam. Find out what the limit is and stick to it.

3) The META tags bear no relation to the site.
If you have the phrase 'John's Great Widgets' in your META tags, but it's not anywhere on the page of your site, really you're wasting your time (unless you have a really non competitive phrase). A search engine is just like a database – it is logical (believe it or not!) and can only do what you tell it to do. Give it a helping hand guys!

Now, before I get loads of emails from people – I know that META tags aren't the be all and end all of search engine promotion; however, they DO help and therefore they DO have a valid place in a website. I’ll cover other ways of getting to the top of search engines in other weekly tips.