More than making your website beautiful and standards-compliant, it is also important that it is full of relevant content. Our main goal should always be making the site “seen” throughout the web. This is why we do SEO. And this is why you need to make your website “content-packed”. But you have to do it the right way.

There are five (5) most important ingredients of a complete and most of all, search-engine friendly sites:
• Standard-compliant and beautiful design
• Good navigation
• Relevant Information
• Link popularity
• Link exchange

All these elements need to work together properly in order for the site to maximize its potentials and serve its purpose. And content is of major importance because without a good one, there would basically be nothing for the Search Engines to crawl.

In writing website content, you take note of the following:

• Conciseness of information

Keep it short and crisp. Be positive and direct to the point. Never be too abstract and no need to create so many long pages about the same blurbs. Make all your pages relevant to the information or services you offer your readers or target customers.

Do not overload a single page with so much information under one heading. Make it a habit to create subheads and put limits to the number of words depending on what you are writing about and your target readers. The ideal is 400 -500 words generally and 1000-1200 words for the more informative sections of the site.

• Relevance of SEO Keywords

Never forget to include in your content the words that your target audiences are most likely to type on the search fields of Google, Yahoo, MSN, Bing, and other search engines. Keep in mind that you need to put these keywords in the title tags, meta tags and descriptions and of course, scatter them all over your content to make them searchable.

• Good grammar and sentence construction

Poor content can be such a turn off to readers, especially those that are absurdly constructed. The web is a universal venue for exchange of information and since English is the universal language, you must learn how to write your content in grammatically correct English sentences so that your site will be taken seriously by readers.

• Relevance of Links

Never post unnecessary links or those that do not have anything to do with what your website is all about. Doing so could decrease your site’s credibility.

I was told that they work like magic and are able to put your website on top of the ranks. You just have to put them on your website code as elements of the HTML or XTML. They should provide the metadata, data and detail the page description, keywords and other information about the webpage where they are placed to make that page search engine-friendly.

But further readings on Meta tags led me to realize that these things I learned about them are now mere magnifications of their power and benefit for my website. In short, Meta tags and other Meta elements are no longer as important as they were before.

About 10 years ago, Meta tagging was the hottest thing to do for SEO. Simply by putting these elements on your page, you could easily improve your website’s search engine rankings. But this was until they got misused and abused. Spammers started to use spam keywords with these tags to make them rank higher than the straight and genuine websites. For these reasons, all the major search engines dropped meta tags from the equation.

The improvements in search engine spider technology have also caused the robots to ignore the tags in the website codes. Google, as a matter of fact, no longer uses meta tags, keywords, or descriptions at all.

According to Dave Bush, one of the SEO gurus and experienced developers I once worked with, there are three basic rules in SEO.

Rule number one is that anything that can be abused will be.

Rule number two is that anything that can be abused will get discounted in the equations.

Rule number three is that the more “natural” the links to your website and your site itself looks, the better the chance of making it to the higher ranks.

Although some websites say that it has completely lost it’s worth in SEO, I believe that meta tagging still does work somehow. Some search engines still do utilize these tags and descriptions and Google uses them to search for websites and generate results.

Meta descriptions can still help the click through. For example, your main phrase is “seo wordpress plugins”, the Title tag should have that and the description should lead off with that phrase.

The description should also be basically a sales copy, sort of like writing a Google ad word advertisement. Doing this will increase the chances that Google will use the description rather than using some random text in the middle of the page. Using this technique, you are 7 times more likely to make a sale off natural search than real ad words.

In summary, both meta keyword and content descriptions still have their place in SEO but not too much fuss should be spent on them. Since they are now just small elements in optimizing your website, too much time and resource should not be given them. In short, they don’t work like magic at all.