In the early days of the Internet, many search engines used Meta tags to know what content a web site contained.

Meta Tag (defination) are as important as they were in the early days of the Internet. “In the early 2000s, search engines have veered away from reliance on meta tags since many web sites used inappropriate meta keywords or a technique known as keyword stuffing, in order to increase their search engine ranking.

Some search engines still take meta tags into consideration when delivering results, though most of the major search engines ignore them.” (wikipedia.org)

Example
Here is an example of what a newspaper could use for tags: Description Tags: Local news, obituaries, sports, opinion, classifieds, career builder, cars.com, and community information from the ‘city’ paper

Keywords: newspaper’s name, [website url], city, state, careers, Classifieds, Jobs

Search Engine Submissions
Google has agreements with Yahoo! Directory and/or Open Directory Project index, which is owned by Netscape to include the sites indexed in their directories in the Google index.

Sites can be submited to Yahoo! Directory by clicking on the Suggest a Site link on their site.

Sites can be submitted to the Open Directory project by clicking on the link Suggest URL on their site.

If a site is added above, there is no reason to add it to Google, since Google pulls from those directories. However, sites can be added to Google by going to http://www.google.com/submit_content.html

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35291

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Note: Most of this information was found at wikipedia.org.

I recently ran across an article on InfoWorld.com that sumerized the top 5 quirks that web surfer’s hate most about web sites. Spending a large portion of my life on the web, I agreed with all of these and was glad to know that I was not alone.

The top five Web site quirks that users hate the most, according to iFocus are:

1. Invasive advertising: Cunnington says users widely despise ads that cover content, ads that flash wildly and ads that chew broadband.

2. Re-inventing the wheel: people do not want to have to learn how to use a site before they can browse it, Cunnington said.

3. ‘Leap of faith’ links: that means disclosing information on content and file size.

4. Attention-deficit Web sites: “Users have a special hatred of flashing icons and banners, because they draw the eye away from what is important and hinder their progress,” Cunnington said.

5. War and Peace length: “A common mistake in Web design is to just [convert] a brochure to the Web. But the Web is its own medium, and communication has to change to reach users. Users are known to read 25 percent slower on the screen than on paper, read fewer words and don’t like long pages which require scrolling down,” she said. Another problem is site blindness. “We are now seeing right-column blindness, where users do not see information and links down the right hand side of the screen. This occurs because the right hand column has become known for advertising,” Cunnington said.

Update: Here are a few more suggestions some that I made in my original post and other I didn’t. These were taking from a MacWorld article, The Art of Creating Strong Passwords.

• Substitute numbers for letters and vice versa. (o instead of 0, 4 instead of A, 1 instead of L, E instead of 3)
• Substitute words for numbers (one, two , three…)
• Combine both the of above (0ne, thr33, f1ve)
• Use capitalization in random places (bLue, happY)
• Use special characters ( !@#$%^&*(){}[] ) to punctuate and separate words
• Create passwords out of words, numbers or phrases you’ll remember
• Misspell words

Original Post:

Everyone seems to have a hard time coming up with good passwords. If you come up with a password, how do you know if it is a strong password or not?
Here are a couple of useful links:

Password Strength Tester
Password Generator

Other suggestions. Don’t use words in dictionaries. Maybe combine multiple words, but throw some symbols in for letters, examples: instead of using an e, use a 3, instead of an a, use an @, 1 (one) instead of an L, etc.

Maybe use the password generator above, and use a symbol instead of a letter in some of the suggestions.

http://www.cnettv.com also has a short video clip on some thing that can be done to create and remember secure passwords. Remember what they are protecting when you select them. If it doesn’t matter if someone guesses or hackes your web site, e-mail, computer, then select something easy. If it does matter, take a bit more time and figure something out stronger.

Top 10 Most Common Passwords
10. Thomas
9. arsenal
8. monkey
7. charlie
6. qwerty
5. 123456
4. letmein
3. power
2. password
1. 123

Other common guessable, but non-static passwords are

1)  Your Address
2)  Your phone number
3)  The name of spouse or model of car
4)  The dog or cat’s name