When you create a website, how will people find it? You can use promotional media that advertises your URL like business cards and print ads, but people surfing the web are most likely to search for you by using a search engine like Google. It makes sense to take the necessary steps to make your website "search engine friendly." This is referred to in the industry as SEO or SEM (Search Engine Marketing). You can pay to have your website listed in a search engine's database, but there are many things a webmaster can do while creating a website to make it more likely to end up with a high ranking in search engine result pages. This is called "organic" search engine optimization.
A summary of common steps you can take to make your web pages "search engine friendly" is found in this short article:
Basic On-Page Search Engine Optimization Techniques
http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/basic-onpage-search-engine-optimization-techniques.html
Many articles that are written about SEO give a very high importance to selecting appropriate text for the content of the <title> tag.
<title>Content for Title Goes Here</title>
Two articles giving hints on how to write a good title tag are:
How to Use Effective Title Tags for Better Ranking and Branding with Search Engines
http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/how-to-use-effective-title-tags-for-better-ranking.html
and
How to Write Effective Title Tags
http://www.kemptonsmith.com/titletips.html
The meta tag for description may also be used to help search engines determine page content and place the page appropriately in an index for search results. Some search engines rely on these tags for information and some ignore them.
You already have a meta tag inside the <head> section of your page to name the character encoding. Keep it. You can have more than one meta tag.
Adding meta tags into the <head> section of a webpage in Dreamweaver is very easy. While in DESIGN VIEW, follow these menu commands:
The Description Meta Tag
In DESIGN view: Insert menu > HTML > Head Tags > Description
Type the description text into the textbox and press OK
AFTER inserting the meta tag while in DESIGN view, go to CODE view to see the completed description meta tag. It should be placed in the <head> section of the page and be similar to:
<meta name="description" content="This is the content for the description meta tag in sentence format." />
When viewing your meta tag in CODE view, be sure that it has a name attribute, NOT the http-equiv attribute.
If you see that your meta tag has the http-equiv attribute, delete it and go back through the menu commands being sure that you do NOT choose "meta" from the commands list. Be sure you choose "description".
To determine the content for the description meta tag, look closely at the unique information the page represents. Write a short description in sentence/paragraph form to "advertise" the content of your page. For example, the home page for Parkland College uses this as the content of its description meta tag:
<meta name="Description" content="Welcome to Parkland, a community college in Champaign, Illinois. Start here and transfer to University of Illinois or other university; or train for one of 80+ career paths. Planetarium, theatre, art gallery, study abroad, athletics, and more." />
Articles to help you understand the purpose of the description meta tag and how to choose appropriate text can be found at:
3 Reasons Why Meta Tags Are Still Important
http://www.webclimb.ca/Importance_Of_META_Tags.php
How To Use HTML Meta Tags
http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2167931