Now, most of you who are reading this are saying "Duh", but let me ask you this: Do you REALLY know how to use Google and get most out of this incredible search technology?

Hopefully, these tips will help you find EXACTLY what you want next time you head on over to "Google Land" and start searching.

To start, unlike most search engines, Google does not care if your search term is in UPPER or lower case. In fact, it can even be MiXeD case and search results will be identical no matter how you type in your term.

The Google GOLDEN Rule: BE SPECIFIC!

When using Google search engine, you must be specific in what you ask and HOW you ask it to get results you desire.

How do you be specific?

Let's say you are interested in finding out more about field of Direct Response Marketing. To search for that exact phrase you put "quotes" around phrase like this: "direct response marketing". This forces Google to cough up search results with those exact words in that specific order, only.

If you didn't use quotes and just typed in direct response marketing, you would get results that included words: direct, response and marketing mixed in with MORE SPECIFIC results of precise phrase "direct response marketing".

META TAGS EXPLAINED

META tags are HTML Tags that describe contents of a web page. The primary purpose of Meta tags is to help catalog and categorize contents of a web page. If your pages do not contain them then they may not get categorized well by search engines.

Meta tags are used because they help web pages get better rankings on search engines. They also allow web site creator to write description search engines will show, specify keywords that search engines will use to find your site, and also a lot more information which helps search engines better find and rank your web site.

I recommend that you at least include 'Description', 'Keyword' and 'Robots' tags. Also 'Title' of your page plays an important role in helping search engines (and visitors) to determine content of your site.Only 25% of sites use meta tags, but most search engines evaluate META tags when they rank your site.

Let's look at how meta tags are properly placed in your page, example below uses most commonly used attributes.

Description

Keywords

Robots

Revisit

Meta Data Example. Insert your Meta data between your HEAD Tags as shown below:

home and car including Mp3 and DVD players, televisions, theater systems, car speakers, car amplifiers, XM radio, receivers and more.">

DESCRIPTION META TAG

Example: home and car including Mp3 and DVD players, televisions, theater systems, car speakers, car amplifiers, XM radio, receivers and more.">

The description tag gives search engine description that you want for your web site. If you don't have description tag, robots will simply choose first couple hundred words on your page and create its own description.

Your main goal with description is to make it appealing to a human. This text is what's going to convince them to click your listing, so think carefully about it. Also, make sure you have a different description for each page on your site.

Quick Tips:

An ideal description should be somewhere within 150 to 200 characters, which correctly describes content of page.

Keep words consistent between your description and keyword tags.

Avoid sentences such as: The best site on web…

KEYWORD META TAG

Example:

Search engines will often use keywords found on your pages as primary source to categorize your website based on search engines indexing algorithms (proprietary algorithms which index your website in search engine databases).

Be sure you choose keywords that are most relevant to your site and avoid excessive repetition as many search engines will penalize your rankings for attempting to abuse their system. Similar to Description META Tag, search engines give priority to first few words in your description, so focus on your main keywords and then elaborate further by using synonyms or other related words.

Quick Tips:

Be specific. Usually, two-word and three-word phrases work better than single words.

When creating your keywords list, place version of keyword that your site visitors use most at beginning of your keyword list.

Since some keywords are commonly misspelled (such as word "millennium"), you might want to put a misspelled keyword in your meta-tags. However, if that misspelled word does not appear in your main body text, this strategy is a waste of time. Search engines use both keyword frequency and keyword placement in their algorithms. If you are putting a misspelled keyword in only one place (i.e., your meta-tag keywords attribute), it's not helping your web page's relevancy because keyword concentration for that one word is practically non-existent.

ROBOTS META TAG

Example:

The content of Robots META tag contains directives separated by commas. Search engines send out what are called robots, crawlers or spiders to visit your site and gather web pages. The above defined directives are INDEX and FOLLOW. The INDEX directive specifies that an indexing robot should index page, or add it as a search engine listing. The FOLLOW directive specifies that a robot is to follow links on page.

REVISIT META TAG

Example:

The revisit meta tag defines how often a search engine should return to your site to re-index it. This is commonly used on web sites that are frequently updated. Possible values can be any amount of time you want: "30 days", "3 months" "1 week".