Playing the search engine game - virtually all webmasters do it in some form or another. Everyone vying for a coveted "Top 10" spot; experimenting with keywords; tweaking pages for a specific engine. You'll find lots of information online, sound advice and not so sound, instructing you on how to design your pages to rank higher.

That's all well and good; of course every webmaster would enjoy having his or her site rank high in the listings, but what about "the rest of us"? What can be done to boost clicks no matter where you appear in the rankings?

There are a couple of problems I see repeatedly on sites I'm asked to review. In my opinion, if these problems were corrected, the webmaster would enjoy a significant increase in traffic.

These two problems are: poorly chosen page TITLEs and inadequate (or lack of a) META description tag.

Granted, not every single search engine supports META tags or displays your TITLE tag in search results, but enough of the "biggies" do for you to devote some extra time to developing these two items.

The first area you should take a serious look at is your page TITLE. The TITLE tag is located within the ... tagset. If you don't have a TITLE tag, get one - today.

You should choose your TITLE tag very carefully because in some search engines it will identify your page in the search results. Your TITLE tag should be somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 characters in length, definitely should contain a few of your keywords, it should be descriptive, and it should entice the searcher to click on your link.

Please don't use the ubiquitous and generic "Home Page" for your TITLE; even if it *is* the home page. Let's look at a scenario as an example:

I'm surfing around one day and decide I want to get a little information on obedience training for my pet weasel, Fluffy. I enter "obedience training AND weasel"; lo and behold, links to two pages pop up! Here are the two results:

1. Home Page

2. Weasel B. Goode's Obedience School - Weasel owners, we can help!

Now, assuming you believed that having a weasel as a pet, or sending said weasel to obedience school was within the realm of possibility for a rational person, which link would you choose?

Once you've crafted a winning TITLE tag for your home page, it's time to develop a good META description as well.

The META description tag is located within the ... tagset and follows this format:

This tag is what many search engines use as a description of your page, hence the name "description"; funny how it works that way, huh?

Your description should also contain keywords and (of course) describe your page in a way that would encourage the searcher to select your link. This tag, however, can range from around 130 characters in length up to about 300 characters with the major search engines. I'd play the lower end just to be safe.

The most common mistake that I see with this tag is not that site designers give a poor description of their pages, it's that they don't give any description at all - no META description tag. If your page does not have a META description, today would be a great time to give it one.

Using our example from above, let's look at the advantage a good description can give you; once again, the search results:

1. Home Page

2. Weasel B. Goode's Obedience School - Weasel owners, we can help! Oh how we love our little darlings...until we catch them red-handed with a map to the chickenhouse and a dog-eared copy of "Sneaky Carnivorous Mammal: A Memoir". Let us help you help your pet! We offer a seven week obedience training course as well as several highly regarded books on subjects ranging from dealing with the "problem" pet to how to conduct an intervention when poultry addiction gets out of hand.

OK, OK, so that description ran way over 300 characters. I was just trying to use a little humor (I know, *very* little) to illustrate how a good TITLE and META description tag may help you gain a little advantage over the competition.

If you don't currently have both of these tags in place, there's no better time than the present to go to work on them. In fact, in many cases it's pointless to continue your search engine jockeying *without* these tags!

I am the owner of ASPiRE Internet Marketing and PromotingYourSite.com.

I have had my articles published in several ezines and newsletters and in print.

I offer advice on designing and promoting web sites that aren't filled with technobabble. I specialize in helping small business owners effectively design and promote their web site.