Meta Tags are hidden description fields that help search engines to categorise websites. They are also of reduced importance than a few years ago.

Correct use of meta tags is nevertheless a factor in search engine algorithms and worth getting right.

A few considerations:-

- Shorter tags are more focused than longer ones. - Usually first phrase has greater weight than later ones. - The title tag is of most value - Description and keyword tags are of lesser importance

Over recent years, search engines have become much more sophisticated and are now able to identify theme of a page by analysing text.

Google is leading search engine, so having right strategy for optimisation on Google is essential.

FFA sites Having a link on your website to an FFA (free for all) otherwise known as a links farm will not damage your PR. What will harm your site and your Google Page rank is outbound links from your site TO FFA sites.

Page rank is Google’s own measure of links and their quality to your site. Page Rank is an important factor, but not only factor in Google’s algorithm.

FFA links must be avoided to protect your site, it is very important therefore to screen carefully each site you link to. Using Google's PR tool (a free download from: - www.google.com ) can give you clues as to how Google rates sites. FFA sites are usually fairly easy to spot, as they contain lots of links to site that have no common theme or thread and site itself appears to serve no purpose other than provision of links.

A greyed out PR usually means a site with a penalty a PR of 10/10 is a perfect score (only Google has one) 0/10 means little or no useful links etc.

The reason for this is straightforward: - Google recognises that you do Not have control over who links to you, but you do have control of which sites you LINK TO.

Once Google has blacklisted you – it is very hard to get re-listed only options being to persuade Google you have “reformed” or move your site to another domain name and start again!

Google’s algorithm

If you’re a mathematical whiz you might also find following article of interest http://www.iprcom.com/papers/pagerank/.

What it says is that average page rank of a group of pages always remains as 1.0. So for every highly ranked page there must be lower ranked ones. Page rank passes from page to page after application of a dampening factor (usually 0.85).

The point being that pages with outward links reduce page ranks whilst those with inward links gain it. The higher ranking of source and lower number of other outward links more valuable it will be to you.

Link dilution