If you're working to increase your link popularity through reciprocal links and refuse to link to web sites that are lower than PR 5, rethink your strategy. Well-designed, well-ranked sites with informative content are always a safe bet to link out to. That was my basic strategy with a client of mine, www.1bbweb.com.

They have a PageRank 4 (at time of writing this article, January 2005) and rank at #6 on Google for 'bed and breakfast directory' (without quotes). The #7 result has a PR 6 and next three spots in first page of results are PR 5 web sites, all higher than my client. This example is repeated throughout Web and proves that preoccupying yourself with PageRank can result in losing sight of more important ranking factors.

Description META tag:

In past this tag was used to specify text that would appear in search engine results alongside link to your site. Keywords could be placed into this text to influence ranking. However it was abused similar to Keywords META tag and has befallen same fate, meaning it is not as useful as it once was. Some search engines do not display it in their results (most notably Google, which retrieves text from content on your page) and do not use it to rank a site. Having said that some search engines do still use it so again it is a mistake to ignore it completely.

Descriptions placed into this tag should, strangely enough, be very descriptive of page or site they reside in. Include a few relevant keywords/keyphrases that you are optimizing for in description and try to limit its length to 25-30 words. Also try to use no more than two sentences.

Summary:

Although not as important as they once where, META tags can still influence a search engine when it comes to deciding whether your web page is relevant or not.

Keywords META tag:

15-20 keywords, include misspellings of keywords/keyphrases

Description META tag:

Include keywords/keyphrases, 25-30 words, no more than two sentences.