I need to do some search engine optimization...

Clearly I need to learn how to do SEO, but from what I've read, I'm overwhelmed. What are the baby steps?

I've heard of "meta tags". Are they appropriate for SEO?

TIA,

Meta tags aren't so important anymore, but they're not completely useless, so put them in anyways. I got my website to the number one hit in Google by following these steps:

1. Meta tags in head of HTML.
2. Adding my URL to google.
3. Signing up for Google analytics (free).
4. Adding TONS of keywords that apply to my business, be very specific. Rather than "cars", or even "used cars", use "used imported cars", etc.
5. Google AdWords
6. ALT and TITLE tags on my images on my site.
7. Use my keywords a lot in my site's text.
8. Make a sitemap.xml file and submit it to google.
9. Got a friend with a few websites to link to me on all of his sites.

That's about all I did, but there's a lot more. Just search "search engine optimization" in Google.

Thanks Surfwax95, That's really helpful and I like a nice list. I can attack that one at a time.

Have a good one,

Google relies heavily on links to judge how a site places. The more links going to your site from relevant sites, the better.

IMO after the links, the following are considered:

• age of domain/website
• well written spider-bot accessible code (semantic html) with tags
• meta information
• . . . etc etc