Posted By Nasir Abbas Jafri / 14th September 2008
“Fighting for a #1 position often unwittingly wins you other prizes along the way.” Though your assumptions we’re equally correct, my actual intention for this was in reference to longtail keywords. If you’re shooting for the #1 most popular keyword, you often pick up less significant longtail keyword searches along the way (if your content is diverse and of quality.)
Also, as far as forum signatures and blog posting, I still believe this is a valid way of driving traffic as well as increasing exposure to fellow relevant webmasters, but this is only so if you contribute quality info. When SEO’s spam with poor quality information purely to advertise, they’re likely to be deleted. Also, most of these areas are set up to not allow link juice to pass from your link. Therefore, it’s only worth the traffic, and that only comes from good content.
Posted By Nasir Abbas Jafri / 12th September 2008
The large majority of search engines do not use Meta Tags as part of their ranking algorithm. Some will claim Google uses Meta tags in its algorithm. This is entirely untrue.
Google, however, will use a meta description tag if it is unable to discern a description for a webpage on its own (if the page has no text and no description in the open directory [dmoz] it is likely Google will use the meta description tag in its SERPs). Please note that it is only using this description in its SERPs, not its algorithm.
Should you use Meta Tags in your site? Yes. They do have some affect in some search engines and even though that effect is almost zero it is still more then zero so is worth the time.
How much time should I spend on my Meta Tags? Ten minutes. Write a nice concise description of your page and throw in a sampling of keywords (which you should have handy if you’ve optimized your pages properly). You should spend no more time then this on them. Use your time to promote your site and get quality inbound links.
How many keywords should I use? As many as you want. If you start to think you may have too many, you probably do. This means you need to divide your page into subpages with each one taking its own topic.
