I've got a fan page up of a band: Silverchair. The page has some youtube videos, band discography, bio, articles, links to the official site and myspace page and Amazon links. What should I be using in the way of tags? Would I have something like "silverchair, silverchair bio, silverchair band, silverchair music..." or "silverchair, bio, band, music...". And what other appropriate tags should I use?
If you are referring to Meta description and Keyword tags? There are a few things to consider. Meta Keywords, though a nicety don't hold that much water as they relate to search result rankings. This because they are so easy to manipulated, most search engines avoid giving them substantial consideration in their ranking algorithms. That's not to say you shouldn't provide Meta Keywords, just don't break your back thinking of super tricky relative keywords. Do not put the same keyword in over and over. Simply enter 20-25 band related keywords. So good keywords could be the bands genre, member names, CD titles, other bands they sound like, etc Meta description tags a re a bit more important, but not that much. Write a clear two, three paragraph selling Silverchair. E.g. “Silverchair, a ferocious rock and roll quartet from Detroit that blends power of the Sex Pistols with the hallucinations of Pink Floyd.†This copy is what will display in organic search results. BTW, I admit I have no clue who Silverchair are or sound like. But you get the picture pax
Use the meta tags, but don't spend a lot of energy on coming up with anything more than what djkentuckyham suggested. Instead, use your keyphrases in the content of the page. Search engines give more credence to terms that are bolded, italicized, underlined, in lists, or words included in header tags. In addition, make sure all the images on your page have appropriate alt tags. If you have a picture of Silverchair onstage in Sydney, Australia, make the image name Silverchair_sydney, and the alt tag "Silverchair in Sydney Concert". Search engines will also look at your Title text, so make it count! I've found that a search term that is mentioned in both the Description and Keywords meta tags, the page title, and in 3 or 4 different areas on the page make for the best optimization. Add to that the image names and alt tags, and you've got a fairly optimized page.
Thank you both for the replies thus far. The tags are for Squidoo, which have been working quite well with Google as far as indexing goes. I'd also be looking to use the same approach to Hubpages and Gather. I noticed with Gather it didn't take long for me to get on the first page for a Google search for the term instant adsense approval which was a tag I used on one of the articles I published.