March 9. 2008

Hey peter, most of your questions can be answered by taking a look at this article on search engine land: http://searchengineland.com/070905-194221.php. I've tried to answer the rest below:

1) Who supports the keywords tag: yahoo and ask, see the article for details.

2) H1 tags should only be used once per page, but you can use H2 and H3 as often as you'd like. However, make sure that you really just putting "heading" type content in them, or search engines might perceive it as being spammy.

3) <p> vs <div> these are actually very different tags. You should use <p> for sticking your text into. You can think of <div> tags like a container that you can apply a style to. Many folks use them to arrange the layout of content on their pages. (For example, use the "inspect element" feature in firebug and take a look at how I'm using <div> on my blog)

4) It is possible to do custom 404 pages and still return the correct status code. You can configure this at either the web server level or sometimes at the application level (like asp.net).

5) The meta description tag should be long enough to cover the subject, but short enough to be interesting. Generally this is anywhere from a sentence to a paragraph depending on the amount of content in your page.

nbuggia