It sounds like 'the more the merrier' should be the approach used and it's simply a case of duplicating and packing your site with keywords to achieve a good result. WRONG!!! An arbitrary line is drawn by each search engine, beyond which your enthusiasm will be seen as an attempt to unfairly and inappropriately position your site higher than others of similar content - this is called "spamming the index". The penalty for spamming is exclusion from the search engine, so a few suggested rules to avoid this are:

• Limit the length of your description to 150-200 characters

• Limit the total size of your keyword list to 750-1000 characters

• Although no set limits exist, the general consensus is not to repeat a word more than 7 times in the META tags. You can usually nudge over this number by using phrases, and other words in between the repeats.

  <meta name="keywords" content="mango, mango, mango, mango, mango, mango, mango, mango, mango, mango, mango, mango"> (You're asking for trouble)

  <meta name="keywords" content="mango farm, mango farmers, mango sales, mango vendors, mangosauce, mango juice, mango growing, mango pulp"> (Better!)

• When using phrases, think about phrase combining to reduce the number of keyword repeats yet still still squeeze all the combinations in:

  <meta name="keywords" content="selling fish, fish food, raising fish, fish tanks, feeding fish, fish farmers"> (OK)

  <meta name="keywords" content="selling fish food raising fish farmers feeding fish tanks"> (Better!)

• The order in which your keywords appear is also important. In the META and TITLE tags assume that perceived importance will decrease from left to right so put what you consider to be your most important terms first. Once again though, take time to figure out what your important terms are. The following would rank reasonably well for queries for "cairns accommodation" but would not rank as highly in searches by anyone looking for family accommodation in Cairns.

  <title>Cairns Accommodation: Seagull Motel - Cairns, Great Barrier Reef, Australia</title>

  <meta name="keywords" content="cairns, accommodation, hotel, beachfront, great barrier reef resort, holiday, restaurant, pool, queensland, self contained family apartments, babysitting service, kids welcome">

  <meta name="description" content="Cairns newest beachfront resort style hotel features a really nice pool and a themed restaurant and lots of palm trees. Located right in the city centre and just 1 hour south of the Daintree Rainforest. With spacious budget 2 bedroom self-contained family apartments, inhouse childminding and kids club we are ideally suited for parents with young children. ">

• Make sure that your main keywords are also built into the first 1 or 2 paragraphs of the actual text of the page, and then scattered fairly regularly through the rest of the page.

• Don't use "invisible text" (making the text the same colour as the page background) within the coding of the page. The search engines have been awake to this one for quite a while now, yet we still notice quite a few sites sabotaging their own best efforts by doing it. The old tricks for getting around it don't work any more either. The difference between text and background color now has to be at least 20%, and the major search engines can also now query a GIF background tile to find out what color it is, and compare that to the text colour used.

How Can We Help You?

The whole META tag optimisation exercise can be quite confusing with the complex and varied requirements of each search engine to maximise visibility, yet at the same time avoid being penalised for spamming. If you would like us to help you out with your META tag and keyword structure, please fill out our Sign-Up Form to give us a starting point from which to develop an appropriate keyword structure for your site.

Our services page also has details of other ways that we can help you in your battle for search engine visibility.