[kirbie]

a. Title - The page title is often used by search engines as anchor text in their listings. Your title should inform people about the page’s content. Be as descriptive as possible. Refrain from repeating keywords “for SEO”. Use keywords wisely. Titles should be no more than 65 characters long. Two common, effective formats are:
i. Site name – Page description using keywords 1-2 times
ii. Page description using keywords 1-2 times – Site name
b. Meta description - The meta description tag may be used by search engines in their listings. It should describe the page in greater detail than the title and offer a brief but compelling reason for people to visit the page. Meta descriptions should be no more than 250 characters long. Use plain, simple language. Avoid superlatives like “best”, “greatest”, ‘proudly”, “proudest”, etc.
c. Meta keywords - The meta keywords tag may still be honored by smaller search engines but Google and Bing disregard it in their general Web search results. Use the meta keywords tag only for internal site search tools.
d. Meta robots - By default, search engines assume “index,follow,archive” for all pages but it doesn’t hurt to include them. Future legal settlements may require Web designers to explicitly extend permission to search engines to index, follow, and archive content. NEVER use “noarchive” until a page has appeared in the search engines’ indexes (“noarchive” almost guarantees that new pages won’t be indexed). “Nofollow” is generally regarded as a sign that someone is being sneaky about link exchanges. Only use “nofollow” to control how search engines crawl your own site. Use “noodp,noydir” to tell search engines not to use descriptions from DMOZ and the Yahoo! directory in their search results. Search engines will generally use your meta description tag if they see these values in your robots meta tag.
e. Hx headers - The search engines look at Hx headers as being approximately equivalent to using BOLD (or STRONG) and a large FONT size. It doesn’t matter if you use Hx headers or just BOLD large FONT text snippets. However, DIVs and SPANs are ot substitutes for Hx or FONT with respect to how search engines evaluate emphasis placed on text. The greater the emphasis you place on keywords through large FONT sizes, BOLD (or STRONG), ITALICS (or EM), etc., the higher your page’s relevance score becomes for those words.
f. Bold or Strong - The search engines have indicated they treat BOLD and STRONG elements equally. It is probably best to use the STRONG element consistently. DIVs and SPANs are not substitutes for BOLD or STRONG. The search engines can parse style sheets but they may not associate emphasis derived from class definitions with text embedded in DIVs and SPANs. Also, some Websites block crawlers from accessing their style sheets.
g. Italics or Emphasis - The search engines have indicated they treat ITALICS and EM elements equally. It is probably best to use the EM element consistently. DIVs and SPANs are not substitutes for ITALICS or EM.
h. Quoted text - Placing quotes around text is a rarely utilized technique for providing emphasis. Both single quotes (‘) and double quotes (“) appear to work effectively. The search engines may not recognize fancy quotes. They will NOT recognize images of quotes.
i. Underscored text - Underscored text is also a rarely utilized technique for providing emphasis.
j. Image alt= text - The alt= text attribute is intended for browsers that don’t support images (or in which images are not being displayed). Use it appropriately. Make the text robust but relevant to the image it is supposed to describe. Unfortunately, search engines do not index title attributes on either links or images. You may be required to use the same or similar text in both alt= and title= attributes for compliance with non-search standards.