Before you submit your Web site to the search engines, you should make sure it is ready to be categorized correctly. You can control how search engines catalog your site with two types of HTML tags. These meta tags are part of the HTML code that search engine crawlers look for but visitors to your pages never see.

1. Description meta tag: Lets you specify a short summary that appears below the webpage's title on a search response. This is what the person sees to decide if what your Web site is worth visiting. It should be your initial sales pitch, so choose your description carefully.
2. Keyword meta tag: Lets you specify the keywords that a search robot should give precedence to when cataloging the page. keywords are typically given less importance than words in the title, but more importance than words found in the page's body.

These tags typically go between the head tags of an HTML page. Here are some guidelines and tips for selecting keywords:

1. Make a list of relevant keywords that you think people will search for when they are looking for a Web site like yours.
2. Make sure your keywords include both general and specific words related to your site.
3. Your keyword meta tag should be less than 1000 characters in length, including spaces and commas.
4. If you are finding it difficult to think of keywords that people will enter in their searches, then use a thesaurus and copy some from your competitor's Web sites! By the way, we didn't tell you that.
5. Make your keywords plural. Add a "s" to the end of keywords. Otherwise if someone types in, lets say "forms", it will not match the keyword "form" in your meta tag. But if the person typed in "form", it will match it with "forms", as the word is contained with your keyword.
6. List the important keywords first as some search engines give precedence to keywords listed first.
7. If your keywords are difficult to spell, list various misspellings of the keywords. People will often misspell a search word. So if the misspelt words matches your misspelt keyword then your Web site will appear in the listing, whereas your competitors won't.
8. Don't repeat keywords too often. Only repeat it about 3/4 times, otherwise you may be penalized.
9. Don't hide keywords in the background. In the old days, people used to hide keywords by displaying it the same color as the background. So you can not see it on the screen, but it is listed in the page. This tactic worked when search engines were unsophisticated and judged a word's relevance only by the number of times it appeared on a page. Now, most search engines know about this trick and count only the first few occurrences of a keyword or phrase. Search engines will penalize your page, by placing it further down the list or not listing it at all.
10. Don't use software that generates your pages dynamically. Search engines don't index dynamically generated pages.
11. Don't use frames. Many search engine crawlers ignore sites that use frames.
Visit www.searchenginewatch.com. This Web site is packed with information regarding search engines and you will pick up a few tips there.