First off, to the beginners...Yes, you must use meta tags if you want to get results from a majority of the search engines! Meta tags are very important and you should have them on EVERY webpage within your website. If you aren't sure how to make meta tags use this meta tag creation tool to make your site's meta tags or to serve as an example as what meta tags should look like.

Ok, now that we have that done with here are some meta tag tips I have picked up.

- Make meta tags for every single one of your pages, I can't stress this enough. Many people put meta tags on their main page and maybe a few other pages under the main page and stop there. Well, that isn't enough. Idealistically when a search engine's bot crawls your website it will eventually get to every page within your website. If you don't have meta tags on all of your pages you are essentially throwing away hits. Try to think of every page as a possible entry point for a visitor, this will greatly improve your chances of more hits from search engines. So make meta tags customized to every individual page within your site.

- Keep them short and sweet. So many times I see sites that have extremely long lists for their meta keywords. Try to stay away from doing this because what you want to do is optimize your webpage for one or maybe two search terms so you get high search engine listings for those terms. If you make a long list of keywords the terms you aren't optimizing for will drown out the keywords you are trying to get high ranking with. If you have a ton of keywords you want to try getting high ranking with then optimize for different keywords on different pages. This furthers supports my previous point of putting meta tags on every page.

- Seed your webpage with the keywords you are optimizing with. So, for example if you are trying to optimize a webpage for "fuzzy bunnies" that means you should have the words "fuzzy bunnies" in your meta description and meta keywords but also have "fuzzy bunnies in your title, at least once in your body, and in the alt tags of an image. Be careful though, if you over do it with your keyword some search engine bots may interpret this as spam and will ban your site from their search engine.