If you don't register a personalized domain name, your site will have an address that looks something like http://stores.bizblast.com/stores/joesfishingtackle. Which is fine, if your marketing and promotion tactics are so powerful that you don't need traffic from search engines. However, there are two big problems from the perspective of search engines: Search engines may discriminate against you if you don't have your own "second-level" domain (the .com part is the "top-level"), and a savvy searcher will be much less likely to click through to your site than if your Web address is simply www.joesfishingtackle.com. The latter simply appears more professional. Also, some engines treat your site address as another "keyword" (more on these below).

True search engines use automated programs called "spiders" to search the World Wide Web for new and updated Web pages. META tags aren't visible to visitors to your Web pages, but they tell spiders what the pages are all about. In general, the most useful META tags in terms of search engine success are the "keywords" and "description" tags.

Keywords should provide a unique identification of the products and/or services offered on your Web site.

• Make a list of words and phrases that a potential customer would enter into a search engine, then edit that list down to 1,000 characters or less, including spaces. List products, categories of products, your business area, etc.
• Put the most important words first, as many spiders consider order when deciding the significance of each keyword.
• Use the plural form of nouns--this will match both plural and singular forms of a user's search term (fishing lures, rods, reels not fishing lure, rod, reel).
• You have a choice of separating keywords with commas or not--different engines treat this situation differently, so there's no consensus on the best strategy at the time of this writing.
• If you're marketing internationally (or to non-English speakers in the U.S.), include translations of your most important keywords in the language you want to target.
• If you have a home page separate from your catalog, try putting your keywords on that page in a different order.
• Should you capitalize? Most engines aren't that case sensitive, so stick with lower case.

A Note on Titles: Though not technically a META tag, your Web page titles are given much weight by search engine spiders in determining relevancy.

The value within the "description" META tag is used in two ways: spiders index the words as if they were keywords (they ignore words like "and," "the," "a," and often "Internet" and "Web site"), and the entire text is displayed on a search engine's results page to give a searcher a summary of your site's content. Your description should be 25 words (or 150 characters) or less, and it should contain as high a concentration of keywords as possible while still making sense.

Depending on the search engine, the text displayed on your site can be even more important than the META tags. The higher the concentration of keywords included within your pages' text, the better chance your site will be highly ranked when a user enters one of those words into a search engine.

Some tactics that were used successfully in the early days of search engines are now considered unethical or are simply ineffective. In any case, using them may have negative consequences, including a lifetime ban on listing your Web pages. So don't engage in any of the following practices:

• Using names trademarked by your competitors in your keywords META tag.
• Viewing the code behind your competitors' Web pages and copying the list of keywords. (Either of the previous two actions could put you on the wrong end of a lawsuit.)
• Including keywords as tiny, unreadable text, or use text colored the same as your pages' background color to "sneak" extra keywords in.
• Repeating keywords within your META tags.