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When optimizing your website and making sure it is ready for the search engines to crawl, there are a few key areas you need to pay attention to. The three main fundamentals of successful search engine optimization are link popularity, meta tag creation and optimizing your website’s content. Here we will concentrate on creating meta tags.
What is a Meta Tag?
Meta tags are found in the HTML code of a web page, and they give search engines information about the page. The most important are the title tag and the meta description. Together with your page’s main headline, they are often the first thing a searcher sees in the search results.
Since first impressions are everything, it is essential to make your title, description and headline readable, relevant, attractive and properly optimized. The real key is not to over-optimize, because that can get your pages penalized by the search engines.
What happens when the search engines crawl your website?
Once you have set up your meta information, the search engines will crawl your website and use it as a brochure for each page. When a search engine crawls your site, it checks how well this information matches the content on the page. Your main keywords should appear naturally on the page, but never so often that they stick out like a sore thumb. If they do, your page may be penalized as spam.
What is key word frequency?
Keyword frequency describes how many times a keyword (or phrase) appears on a page. For example, if your keyword appears 5 times in every 100 words, your keyword density is 5/100, or 5%. There is no ideal keyword density, though: Google has said it doesn’t use one.
The real trick to a good ranking is to produce quality, content-rich pages. Be careful when repeating your main keyword phrases, because the content of your site must never be compromised by your search engine optimization efforts or confuse your readers. If you can keep readers coming back to your website, you know you have got it right.
In conclusion, your meta information should match the content on your pages. The search engines have become much smarter, so trying to trick them with keyword spam will only hurt your website.
Don’t try to spam the engines by submitting content-low pages full of keywords. You want to attract visitors to your site because of the good content your are providing to your readers. Take the time to optimize your site correctly so that you can get the most out of your web site rankings. When you have good content on your site, you will find those search engine rankings climbing to the top.
Good luck optimizing those web pages!
Written by Jennifer Schilling. Updated and fact-checked by the TopWebHosts team in November 2026.