When someone submits a web page or website to a search engine, that search engines looks for two meta tags in the page header of any document it sees. The search engine will spider through a site starting with the first page it comes in contact with and will march through every other page that is linked to every page it sees. The two meta tags the search engines look for in each page of a web site are the description meta tag and the keywords meta tag.

The description meta tag looks like this:

<meta name="description" content="blah blah blah blah">

In the content area you may type a sentence or two not to exceed 200 characters, approximately. Some engines allow more, but most of them permit up to 200 characters including spaces and punctuation. You might use the sentence "Providing inexpensive, quality parts to an entire nation of consumers." or something else that states what you do.

The keywords meta tag looks like this:

<meta name="keywords" content="blah blah, blah, blah">

In the content area you may type up to 20 words, once again not to exceed 200 characters, separated by commas. These will be the key words that the search engine uses to categorize your site. You might use the words parts, cheap, sale, sales, low cost, inexpensive and on and on.  However, try to avoid generic words or terms.  The more specific you can be, the better your chance for a satisfactory search engine listing.

WHAT COMES NEXT AFTER META TAGS?

If the search engines don't find either of these meta tags in the headers of the pages of a site then they try to get text from the page itself. That is why some people may have some strange results from their submission. If you want to add meta tags to your pages, you can either do so with an .html editor / text editor or you can do it rather easily with Microsoft® FrontPage®.

If you are using FrontPage open your main page (or any other page you wish to prepare) in the FrontPage Editor. Click on the pull down menu FILE, then select PAGE PROPERTIES. Next click on the CUSTOM tab. Look at this dialogue box and you'll see that the lower half of the box is called USER VARIABLES. Click the ADD button next to the USER VARIABLES section. You should now see another box with a NAME input box and a VALUE input box. In the NAME input box type description and in the VALUE input box type in the sentence or two you've decided to use for your description meta tag. When finished typing click the OK button.

Do the same thing again, only this time, in the NAME input box type keywords and in the VALUE input box type in the words you've decided to use for your keywords meta tag separated by commas. When finished typing click the OK button and save the page.

You can now do the same procedure to all your other pages and each page can have a different description content and a different keywords content if you like.

If you have previously submitted your web site or page, you will need to update or resubmit your pages and/or site once this is done to make the search engines get the proper info from your pages.

Also see: "How to Use META Tags"
http://searchenginewatch.internet.com/webmasters/meta.html