I’ve been researching meta tags and it’s a little frustrating. There seems to be a lot of conflicting advice out there. What is your take on what you want your meta tags to reflect in order to optimize your search engine results?

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Jay’s Answer: Meta tags can matter, but remember what you really want are the right people finding your website easily (and then converting them to customers).

Focus on value on the copy of the website itself. The home page should be focused around the problem the “right” people are searching on by analyzing web search volume in the past few months. Spend your time crafting the page so it immediately speaks to the needs of the prospect. Yes, make sure that the keywords that people search are are sprinkled throughout the page naturally, but don’t sacrifice human-readability.

Once the site is ready for traffic, then get your site registered with the search engines and get links to your website organically (i.e, without paying for them)(Website placement is based on authority, and one of the metrics of authority is link quality/quantity). You don’t want traffic until you have a site that’s effective.

SEO is an art, hence the wide differing opinions on the techniques.