Header tags are also called meta tags. I call them header tags because they appear between the < head > and < /head > tags in your html source document. There are three of them that you need to concern yourself when it comes to your Search Engine Optimization efforts.

Here’s what they are:

• TITLE
• DESCRIPTION
• KEYWORDS

First of all, these tags are important for Search Engine Optimization reasons. Your title and description tags will actually appear on the search engine results pages when your site is found for a particular query. The title tag is the first thing that searchers will see on the results page. It is also a link that when clicked takes the searcher to your website. That’s pretty important, right?

The description tag is often used as your snippet below the title link in the results page. If you optimize both your title and your description tag with your important keywords then you will increase your chances of ranking highly in the search engine results pages for those keywords.

The keywords tag is the least important of the three, but it’s still relatively important. Most beginning webmasters will make the mistake of adding every keyword important to their website to the keywords tag. You don’t want to do that. You only want to include 3-5 important keywords per page in that keywords meta tag. If a word doesn’t appear on a page, even if it’s important to your website as a whole, don’t include it in your keywords tag. It won’t help you.

Those are the three header tags that you need to pay attention to. They are not the be all end all to search engine optimization, but without the header tags you will struggle in the search engine results page.

I’ve read in several places that the best SEO advice for putting your company name in the title tag is not a good idea. I’ll have to agree. This is just sound, solid wisdom.

If you look at the top of your browser, in the blue bar at the very top, you’ll see the title tag of the page you are looking at. Sometimes, many times in fact, you’ll see a word or phrase followed by a hyphen and another word or phrase. That first word or phrase, before the hyphen, should be a keyword-rich phrase that you want that page to rank for. Most people are not going to search for your company name, unless you are a big branded company that is well known, like Wal-Mart or McDonald’s. In that case, you might want your company name first, but otherwise not.

If you absolutely must put your company name in the title tag, put it at the end, after the hyphen. You might still rank for that name, but what you really want to do is rank for the keywords associated with your company name. That’s branding through your title tag. It works and you might as well just stick to conventional wisdom.

Matt Cutts has a good video today on Google Webmaster Central explaining how to prevent certain pages on your website from being crawled by the search engines.

You really need to be familiar with four methods of preventing the spiders from crawling your pages:

• htaccess
• noindex
• nofollow
• robots.txt
• password protect

Your htaccess file is a ticket to solving a lot of your search engine problems. Not all of them, but some of them. It’s a file on your server that gives instructions to browsers and search engine spiders, telling them how to read your web pages. One common usage of this file is to use it to redirect old web pages to new web pages. Frequently, webmasters will update their information and when doing so will change the URL of a web page. Well, if you do that then you still have that old web page indexed and when people try to visit that page they will get a 404 error page. To prevent that from happening, you can add a 301 redirect command in your htaccess to redirect traffic to your new page.

But the htaccess has other uses as well and you can actually use it to tell the search engines certain information that will prevent them from crawling your web pages. More on this later.

Perhaps the most common way to instruct search engines not to crawl certain pages of your website is the robots.txt file. You can use this file to tell all the search engines, or just some of them, not to crawl specific pages. You just give the URLs of the pages you don’t want to be crawled and specify which search engines are not allowed to crawl those pages.

The noindex meta tag is a bit different than the robot.txt file. It tells the search engines not to show a page in their index. They’ll still crawl it, but they won’t show it in their index so anyone searching for a key term will not see that page on that search engine. Again, you can specify specific search engines or make it general for all search engines.

The nofollow meta tag is a tag that tells the search engines not to crawl certain links. So you can actually have a page that links to one other page on your website and make that link a nofollow link then the one page that spins off will not be found because of that nofollow link. You can nofollow all the links on a page or just some of them.

Finally, if you password protect certain pages, the search engines will not crawl them. They cannot guess your password so those pages are safe. Users of your website can get to them, but the search engines cannot. You can password protect your pages using the htaccess file that I discussed earlier.

Keep in mind that there are complications with each of these methods. The safest and most powerful of all of these methods is the htaccess. The least effective is the nofollow tag because while the links aren’t followed, that page is still on a server somewhere. If you access that page from your browser then move on to another page on your website and you have an analytics program that shows links for referrers, that link could get crawled and you’ll still get traffic to the page. Not a lot, but some, and you’ll run the risk of someone else linking to it. You have the same problem with noindex tags and robots.txt files, so be careful.

For more information on preventing your pages from being crawled, watch Matt Cutts’ video on that topic. He also discusses how to de-index certain URLs you have mistakenly indexed.

In September this year, Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land wrote a long post on the use of the keywords meta tag on web pages. It’s the only article you ever need to read on keywords meta tags. I’m just going to mention three specific things that I found helpful in the article, namely:

• Which search engines support them (and which ones don’t)
• Whether to use commas or spaces
• Are they really necessary?

Is The Keywords Meta Tag Necessary?
I’ll deal with this question first. The bottom line on the keywords meta tag is no, it’s not necessary. Yes, it is helpful sometimes. Do it right and it’ll give you a slight edge. Do it wrong and it’ll be a big, ugly, painful thorn in your side. Quite frankly, the risk of of using the keywords meta tag is bigger than the risk of not using it. Danny said it more eloquently, I think:

Overall, here’s the best advice I can offer anyone dealing with this tag. If you begin to feel confused, concern, tired or uncertain when pondering it, SKIP THE TAG ENTIRELY. It’s not going to hurt you to not have it, and it’s not worth the time fretting about it.

So Which Search Engines Support The Keywords Meta Tag?
That’s a good question. Danny tells a story of an experiment he conducted using fake keywords to see which search engines would retrieve his pages for those keywords in their results pages. His findings match my own experience in this area and this is essentially what he found:

• Google doesn’t support the keywords meta tag
• MSN doesn’t support it
• Yahoo does support it
• Ask supports it

Google, as we all know, get the lion’s share of search traffic online - around 60%. Yahoo! picks up around 15%-25% of the search traffic online, depending on whose figures you believe. MSN grabs a cool 7%-15% and Ask hovers around 4%-7%. (I’m giving windows of latitude here because everyone has their own figures depending on how they weigh search traffic. It doesn’t really matter for this discussion how accurate the numbers are. What matters is that Google is overwhelmingly the largest tool for search and Yahoo! is next. After that, MSNs and Ask’s search traffic percentages are too insignificant to worry about whether you should incorporate the meta tag into your web pages. Google’s and Yahoo!s, however, are. So in the context of this discussion, your keywords meta tag is important at 50% of the search engines.)

If the target market you are trying to reach is more likely to make searches at Yahoo! than Google then you probably want to put more weight on the keyword meta tag. If Google, then I’d say put less importance on the keyword meta tag, if at all. If your target market is more likely to use MSN then don’t worry about it. If your target market is likely to use either Yahoo! or MSN, or Yahoo! or Google, then use it if you think it will help. You can always fall back on Danny Sullivan’s helpful advice to ignore it altogether if you’re confused.

Should the Keyword Meta Tag Include Commas Or Spaces?
Danny goes through great detail to explain this. I’d recommend you read his article. I’m just going to say go with commas because it seems to make the most sense. Yahoo! quality guidelines say to use commas to make a distinction between specific search phrases. I’d have to say I wholly agree with this statement.

Then there are the people who say put a space after the comma and those who argue don’t put a space after the comma (yes, people really argue about that). I can’t see that there’s any difference. It looks better with the spaces, but what matters is the results you’ll get. I don’t think you’ll get any different results either way. Danny doesn’t seem to think so either.

When it comes to your keywords meta tag, it will hurt you more to do it wrong than it will ever help you to do it right. Therefore, if you aren’t sure that you’re doing it right then don’t include keywords< in that meta tag at all.