Both of these are important but let us look at both. What you really need to focus on when you are concentrating on page rankings on search engines, which is where your bread and butter is.
I have been asked many times about Meta tags. While they are an important aspect for describing your website, most search engines don not use them for page ranking. You can list keywords in your head area but understand that Google does not index Meta tags and Yahoo uses Google for its crawler indexing. The reason being is that this strategy has been so abused.
What they do look for is:
Content: What is the content of your website? Is it of quality content? Not full of fluff with just gateway pages. Are your keywords shown through your content in a manner where your text includes those words in a flowing manner?
Boldness of your keywords: Are you keywords in bold? Put them in bold on your homepage.
Keyword Density: This is your keywords in relation to the number of words on your page. In terms of search engine relevancy you need to average 4% to 6%. Look at the amount of words you have o your home page and determine how many places to insert your keywords.
Do not overdue your keywords! Doing so raises red flags to the search engines and will have negative effects.
Today more than ever a website owner must work on their site and watch their rankings. You may need to revamp your site may times. According to the latest news, just reported, from a study conducted by Yahoo!, Prospect, and Jupiter Research, viewers are quickly changing their changing their search queries or the search engines themselves!
The results show that the rate is 23% after a first few search results. In 2002 this rate was only 14%. Another finding shows a bleaker view that after three pages of search results 15% left. Back in 2002 the figure was 22%. As we can see the want for immediate results calls for the best placement.
There is the advantage of Yahoo having the categories which enables visitors to pick from several different choices. The visitor enters the information request and the category is shown with suggestion categories. However, Google does not offer this.
Keep checking your rankings and proceed as necessary.
