Note: This does not mean that you cannot use "Jennifer's Resources", or something like that in headings that your visitors will see on page. We are strictly talking about meta tags here.

Also, if you are selling a recognizable brand, use that name in your title. Titles can be up to 60 characters long to be considered search engine friendly.

Maximizing Meta Tags In order to maximize your meta tags, you should choose words and phrases that people actually enter into search engines. You can find out what people are entering at:

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

It works like this. You enter keyword you would like to use and see how many times people entered those keywords in last month. This tool also gives alternate keyword phrases and tells you how many times they were entered in one month.

Great! You type in home based business and 92,534 people entered those keywords last month, so you figure you should use those keywords. Here's problem...go to Google and enter Home Based Business and what do you find?

On May 15, 2002 there were 4,030,000 sites listed. That's a lot of competition!

You may need to target some of your keywords a bit better. Pick more specific keywords that don't have as much competition. Think about your target market. This is a bit of work but may well be worth your time.

In end, choose a few general key word phrases like "home based business" and then choose a few specific ones.

Other questions I have seen include: will using Flash drop me out of engines? Should I use tables or will that hurt my page ranking? If "low quality" sites link to mine, will Google get annoyed and kick me to second page?

This is, in my opinion, utterly and completely ridiculous. The purpose of web and internet is communication. People write articles, create graphics and multimedia and place them on internet because they have a story to tell or some information to impart.

Of course it is important to promote your site, because part of communication is finding someone to communicate with. However, there are many, many ways to promote a web site. There are as many ways and places to promote as their are stars in sky or electrons on a wire. Just use your creativity and your brain, and you will figure out how to get people to visit your creation, without selling your soul to a search engine.

One of my objections is idea of "theming" a web site. That is not way that web is intended to work and it is not in interest of surfers. When I search on a keyword, I want to find best pages that I can find. If someone wrote a page about their cat but placed it on their site about quilts, then I still might want to see it. In fact, it's possible that this one page has better information than a site devoted entirely to cats.

I have a great example of a site which is one of best on internet by a good man named James Huggins. I'd bet that Google wouldn't appreciate this site very much because it would have a very difficult time figuring out theme. Yet it is by far one of most entertaining and informative sites on entire web (in my opinion, of course).

http://www.jamesshuggins.com/

A major problem with idea of basing ranking of a site on it's popularity is that new or smaller sites tend to drop way down list, even though they are often much better than sites higher on list. It simply is not true that a site which has lots of incoming "quality" links is any better than those sites which do not have as many of them.

Websites are very personal creations, and they should reflect unique viewpoints, opinions and background of authors, artists and creative talent. There is no need to make every site on web look or feel same; There is certainly no need to force every site to fit a set of rules in order to be found by other people.

My advice is to create a web site in which you can be proud. Use all of tools and skills that you have, and use whatever techniques you enjoy. At same time, explore ALL of methods of site promotion, including search engines. But don't place too much weight on engines - they change constantly and they are very fickle. You might sell your soul to get a high ranking one day only to find out next morning that you are gone entirely.