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Lately, there has been a lot of debate about whether the meta descriptions of a web page are worth including anymore. The argument is that if you do not include a meta description, the search crawlers will be able to pull up relevant information off of your page that most closely fits a user's keyword search.

While this does sound like a good idea in terms of having your page's description "ideally" fit the search term that was entered, the drawback is that the crawler can pull any information at random. Text that you may fully describe the web page, but fits the search, will display in the short description of your link in the search results. It may not best describe the page at all.

So while you may not have control over what information the search crawler pulls as a description for your page, including the meta description certainly doesn't hurt. That description will pull up in search results when called for, and will also give people who want to link to your site a good description of what the main page is about since most web designers and developers still look for a meta description when pulling links for pages.

The meta description also comes in handy for many of the online bookmarking sites. They will pull in the meta description as a summary of the page to add to the bookmark information, which makes it easy for people to bookmark your site with the details that you want to appear.

One of the important things to consider when optimizing your website is keyword placement. Generally, crawlers place a higher amount of importance on anything closer to the top of the page. This is why placing keywords in the head and first part of the body of your web pages is so important.

There are many ways to place your keywords in the top of each page of your website. Here are some ways to place your keywords at the beginning of each page:

• The Title Tag: Each page's main keywords should be within in the first few words of the title tag, which should be 65 characters or less.



• The Meta Description Tag: Important keywords should also be included in the Meta Description tag as well. This is the information that will show as the summary of your page in search results, so be sure not make it a sentence, and not just a huge list of keywords. Meta Descriptions should be less than 160 characters or less - otherwise it will be cut off in the search results and showed with... after the 160th character.



• Navigation Bars: If possible, use your keywords in the navigation bar of your website, and have it as a horizontal bar near the top of the page.



• Header Tags: Use your keywords in the <H1> at the beginning of each page's text.

Learn about search friendly design techniques from the search engine gurus. This video covers designing your site to be search engine friendly.

By now, most people have heard about the link building benefits of commenting on blog articles for backlinks. But there is more to it than just randomly commenting on any articles.

The first thing to look for is if the site offers DoFollow comments that link to the URL you desire, as opposed to a link to your profile on their site or another comment system when required to register. DoFollow means that the links will be seen by search engines. This can be checked by using the Firefox NoDoFollow plugin, which, when selected in the right click menu, will highlight commentator's links as purple for DoFollow, and pink for NoFollow.

The next thing to review is if the blog has a comment policy. Some blogs will have a little set of rules near the comment form, or a link to a full comment policy detailing what they will and will not accept in their comments. Typical things that some blog owners will consider spam are commentators that use keywords instead of their name, such as Auto Dealer in Brisbane.

Some sites do allow this - they may have a specific KeywordLuv option that says to put in Your Name @ Your Keywords, and your URL will be anchored to the keywords. If that is not an option, and you do not see a specific comment policy, just check out previous comments on the article to see if other people just used keywords.

The most important rule in commenting for backlinks is to make valuable comments. Blog owners may consider you comment spam if it is irrelevant to the article, or if it could be placed as a comment on any article because of its simplicity, such as "nice post" or "great site" types of comments. Be sure to skim through the article and make a comment that shows you actually read the post.

One way to learn about how to optimize your website for search engines is to learn about how customers will search for your company, products and services. Here is a video from Google explaining its own search options and features.

There are many uses for social media in SEO. One way that social networking sites, such as Twitter, and online social bookmarking sites, such as Digg, can be used is as a keyword research tool.

Because social media is up to date in terms of bringing together live, user generated content, it can be studied to find what topics are being discussed the most at any given time. For example, on Digg, you can simply visit the homepage to see what article topics are being voted up the most. On Twitter, you can look at the trending topics list in the sidebar to see what words or tags are being tweeted about the most.

Knowing what the popular subjects are today can give you the edge if you are creating fresh content for your website. A car warranty site could use the recent debates about auto warranty scams as a topic for an article on their site, showing what their company does differently from the bad businesses. A health related site could write an article about the recent swine flu outbreak.

Why do the hot topics right now matter in SEO? Simple - if you were to write a great article about a topic that everyone is searching for now, your article will become popular, and possibly will receive links from other websites discussing the same subject.

Other ways to use trending topics as keywords is to learn about the latest products and services people are talking about. If you company sells sunglasses, and there is a particular brand that is all the rage, make sure to put that brand's shades on your homepage. If people are wondering if a particular service is available, see if your business can offer that service. The opportunities are endless when striking a particular topic while it is hot.

Whenever you receive a request from another webmaster for a reciprocal or three-way link exchange, responding in the same syntax as the reciprocating site uses will ensure the proper placement of your link on their site.

For SEO, or search optimization purposes, the best way to have your link placed on another site is using keyword anchor text.  If your company sells fashion jewelry, specifically silver, you would want your company to come up in search engine results for any queries for “silver fashion jewelry”, “silver jewelry”, or “fashion jewelry”.  Therefore, these three sets of keywords would be your preferred anchor text.

Thus, when you receive a link exchange request, review the page where your link will be placed.  If the formatting for all the links appears as follows:

Anchor Text
A description of the website.
http://www.companyname.com

Then you should send your linking details in response to the link exchange request as follows:

Title: Silver Jewelry
Description: Our site sells silver fashion jewelry.
URL: http://www.companyname.com

This will be the best way to ensure that your link appears as you want it on the reciprocating site, giving you credit towards your preferred keywords.</p>

Whether you are the webmaster of a company site, personal site, blog, or other web page, at some point, you will receive a request for a link exchange.   Here are some of the commonly asked questions and answers about link exchanges.

Question: What are reciprocal link exchanges?
Reciprocal link exchanges are those where site A is asked to link to site B, and site B will link back to site A.

Question: What are three-way link exchanges? 
Three-way link exchanges are those where site A is asked to link to site B, and site B will receive a link back from site C.

Question: Are link exchange requests legitimate?
Yes, some link exchanges requests are legitimate.  The best ways to check verify if a link exchange request is legitimate is to review the following: 

1. Take a look at the site to which you will be linking.  Be sure that it is a reputable, well designed site.
2. Take a look at the location where your site’s link is to be placed.  Be sure that the page is accessible from the homepage of the main website.
3. Be sure that there is not a high number of links on the page where your site’s link is to be placed.
4. Be sure that the links on the page where your site’s link is to be placed are not questionable or suspicious.  These would include links to sites with online pharmacies, adult content, etc.
5. Be sure that the links on the page where your site’s link is to be placed are DoFollow, and not redirect links.  NoFollow links and redirects will not count for SEO purposes.

Question: Is relevancy important?
Yes, the sites exchange links must have some relevant content.  Sometimes, link exchange requests are accidentally sent to sites that are not quite relevant due to keyword similarities (iron metal vs. heavy metal music), or keywords that appear in a site’s link page (an investing site emails a fashion site because the fashion site has text about an investing magazine somewhere in their site).

Question: Why am I receiving link requests when I no longer have a links page?
Google caches pages on your website after a certain period of time.  Sometimes, when searching for relevant link partners, companies will locate a website with a links page in the search results, and go directly to the homepage of that website for the contact information, without realizing that the links page in the search results is no longer available.  These non-existent pages on your site can appear in results months after the page has been removed from a website.  This is why it is always a good idea to have an custom, informative 404-Page Not Found error for your website to ensure that others stumbling upon missing pages do not end up on an uninformative error page.