Starting from scratch

After years of putting it off, I have started to put a plan together to SEO my site.
My biggest confusion at this point is the right way of doing it.
I'm thinking it would be best tooptimize it for Google.
My questions is, what is the right number of keywords, descriptions, and the number of letters.
Different tools seem to have different opinions of this.

Any help is greatly appriciated.

The site is http://www.beachcomp.com

Thanks all.

Welcome to SEO Chat. One of the best things is to read and read on this board. Find a post of dazzlindonna and read the post SEO for Newbies on her signature. Get stuck, feel free to ask on this board. :smile:

I would take a peek at this thread http://forums.seochat.com/t1126/s.html which has some great ideas.

I would also read the google guidelines on submissions http://www.google.com/webmasters/index.html that has some good guidelines to follow including HTML validation. You can find all kinds of validation tools and HTML spec info at http://www.w3.org/.

Good luck.

Thanks for the links.

It did bring up a question so far... Is ASP a no no?
Seems everyone says to use HTML.

And if I do use ASP, will a search engine not see include files?
I currently have all the tags in one file which get included on the ASP file, but using the below link doesnt see them.

http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/se...2Fbeachcomp.com

Thanks for all your comments and I appreciate all the help I'm already getting.

ASP is processed on the server and then renders HTML to the browser so there sohouldn't be any problem with search engines unless you have a bunch of variables in the URL strings.

Just dive in and take a stab at your site... if you are doing things "right" you will continue to visit and contribute here... and you will learn so much that a few weeks or a few months later you will decide to rebuild because of your new knowledge.

Don't delay because you are worried about doing it "wrong"... you will learn more by doing than by procrastinating. If you are in this for the long term you will be revamping your site(s) over again and again.

I'm at it!
My key concern remains as this tho...

View source on the opening page shows:
All my meta info, which is loaded on the page by <!--#INCLUDE virtual="../Site_Common.asp" -->

But when I hit http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/se...2Fbeachcomp.com it doesnt show.

So, Am I doing it wrong, or using the wrong tool to see how the engine sees me?

that simulator is not designed to show the meta data...just the hard content.

here is a meta tag checker:
ht/tp://www.scrubtheweb.com/abs/meta-check.html

another one:
ht/tp://www.widexl.com/remote/search-engines/metatag-analyzer.html

another:
ht/tp://www.seomasters.com/meta-tag-analyzer/

8)

aye aye capt'n!


THANK YOU!

For the keywords metatag, are you supposed to use commas to separate the keywords? I've seen recommendations to do it either way.