A few years ago, strong keywords and well designed meta tags were enough to get you a high position in search engines. Unfortunately, this is not the case anymore. Now, search engines prefer websites with lots of relevant content and that are frequently updated. And chances are that if you do have lots of relevant content, other webmasters will think your site is a great resource and link to it helping you out with the external link component to high rankings.
Here are some of the key page components and how they really affect search engine rank.
Meta Tags
Meta tags are descriptive tags within html code that act as a summary of what content the spider can expect to find on the page. Several years ago, they were the heart and soul of SEO, but today, no major search engine uses them to determine page relevance or rank in search results. Meta tags can even have a negative effect on your ranking in some search engines if you use too many and the search engine perceives them as spam. They are, however, useful for giving webmasters limited control over how their pages are described in search results.
Title Tags
Title tags are far more important than meta tags. The title tag displays the text that shows up on the blue strip at the top of your web browser and is one of the most important factors in how a search engine decides to rank your page. It is also how all major crawlers will name your page in search results.
Body Content
Search engines look for the location and frequency of keywords within your page. Therefore, it is critical to include keywords in your content. Of course, you should always write for your readers, but you can and should sprinkle in keywords whenever appropriate. Frequently adding and updating new content is also a must!
Frames, Flash, and Dynamic Content
Crawlers have become more sophisticated over the years, though they still dislike pages built with frames or Macromedia Flash. If you have a page built in Flash, you should consider an html alternative that includes all your content. You should also eliminate all frames. In the past, search engines have had problems handing dynamically generated (or database driven) content such as product catalogs, though they have gotten better with them. However, if you have a lot of products with complicated URLs, optimization of each page will require additional workarounds.
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