Websites Under Your Control Blog

We concluded our blog post on July 6 with the caution that "Google can get pretty cranky when you try to trick them" and included a link to a CNN article from a few years ago where it was reported that Google delisted websites owned by the auto manufacturer BMW for attempting to manipulate Google results.

Barely two weeks later, it strikes here in Frisco.

It seems that a perhaps less-than-reputable "search engine optimization" company visited and told a website owner they could hide key words by putting them in white text on a white background, and Google would index the words and thus garner additional search engine results for the extra key words.

Next thing you know, an email from Google shows up...

Sure enough, a Google search revealed no entries at all for the website, which was previously prominent on the first page of numerous Google searches...

The message

Sites built correctly, with meaningful titles, headlines, and content that addresses the visitors' interests will get good results. 

If you are doing anything to try and "trick" the search engines, it will backfire.

Think about it: Google didn't get to be a $150 billion business without at least enough smarts to detect such tricks.

We get asked repeatedly about adding "meta tags" to websites, usually the "keywords" meta tag.

Let's deal with the myth first. Meta tags don't help your search results in Google.  Period, stop, done, over and out.

All the major search engines stopped looking at the keyword tag in 1997, when the "adult" website industry started stuffing innocuous but popular search phrases into their website meta tag keywords, to hijack searches.

The only meta tag that Google looks at that we care about today is the description tag.

How is the description tag used? Google will randomly select snippets of text from your web page and display that as the text in their search results.

If you add a description tag, then Google will throw that description into the mix, along with whatever random snippets it finds on your page.

That's all. It won't boost your ranking at all.

According to Google's Matt Cutts, "Even though we sometimes use the description meta tag for the snippets we show, we still don't use the description meta tag in our ranking."

So, meta tag keywords? Don't waste your time. 

Meta tag description? As a low-priority task, put some creative and compelling text there, and it will show up once in a while in Google's results.

To add text to the description meta tag (or the keywords tag, if you really want to cover all bases), just click on "Add meta data to Web Page" link in your Online Business Partner page editor.

Then, type the text you want to be occasionally used by Google when it displays your page in search results, and click "Publish".  You are done.

(If you're not using our Online Business Partner, check with your webmaster, who will be able to revise your site to add a description tag.)

This won't get you higher up on Google, but it will give you a chance to provide one more bit of compelling text, so when people see it, they won't be able to resist clicking on your link in Google!

(Of course, don't fib. Google can get pretty cranky when you try to trick them!)

We get asked occasionally about optimizing for Yahoo, Bing, and others, rather than Google.

As with any expenditure of time and money, you have to decide where to do your spending.

As of today, Google owns the search world, without question. As you can see from the following graph, Google has 85%, Yahoo and Bing split 10%, Baidu (Chinese language search engine) has 3%, and the remaining 2% is divided among thousands of search engines competing for the crumbs... so why even think about anything other than Google? Go where the searchers go!

Source: NetMarketShare

 

The purpose of search engine optimization is to get traffic to your pages, but your site must be written and formatted for those who visit.

Your headlines serve both purposes. The visual formatting makes the headlines stand out to your visitors. The designation of some text as a headline (using "heading tags") makes it stand out to Google and other search engines. For both, the headlines make it immediately obvious what topics are covered on your page.

How to make a headline

Headline levels, defined using "heading tags," can be numbered from 1 to 6, with 1 being the most important in terms of indexing.

For best results, place the main topic of your page in "heading 1" tags, and the subtopics in "heading 2" tags. If you care about Google showing the page, use words in the headlines that your visitors are likely to search for.  For example, a headline such as About Our Company informs your human visitors what is to follow, but a headline that says you are a company "serving the needs of North Texans needing ambulatory and wheelchair transport" is more informative, and certainly helped Preston Trail Transport to reach the first page of Google. Notice how it tells what they do, and where they do it.

If you use our Online Business Partner^® service, just log in and open your page, click in the relevant text, and click to set the heading in the tool bar. Otherwise, contact your webmaster with your instructions.

The bottom line: Optimize your pages with well-written content that uses important keyword phrasing in the headlines. It is one of the easiest ways to improve your search engine results.

Someone defined "insanity" as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results.

If you try that in Google, you might actually get those different results - but don't worry, it's not you!

A few days ago we blogged about the need for titles on web pages, and while doing so, we searched for a handful of different phrases to find the most illustrative example for our screen shots.

First we searched for "health insurance frisco tx" and then "physical therapy frisco tx" before finding what we wanted when searching for "pizza frisco tx."

On the third search, we saw Google results that included items from the previous searches, totally unrelated to "pizza." See the screen shot at the right.

(The screen shot was fortunate, because trying to replicate this several times resulted in a different set of links each time.)

So no, you are not losing touch with reality -- Google really does vary its results on one search based on what you searched for previously.

This means that your results will vary from one search to another even on the same topic, and if you are on the phone with someone telling them to Google something, their results might very well vary from yours, even at the same time.

 

In website terminology, the "title" is the text that appears at the very top of your browser window when you visit a web page, such as the white text in the blue Internet Explorer window shown here. In tabbed browsers, the page title also appears in the tab.

It's not merely cosmetic!

Search engines use the title as the most significant indicator of what that web page is about, and also as the headline for your entry in their search results.

Note the entry for Palio's on the first page in Google for a search I did for "pizza frisco tx"...



Don't leave your web page with a nondescript title like "home page" -- make it meaningful, and include the 3-5 words that your ideal customers are most like to search for, and you will dramatically improve your search engine visibility!

How you set the title on your website will depend on what tools you have at your disposal to make changes.

If, like Palio's, you are using our Online Business Partner®, just login, go to the web page details screen, and type in the title -- that's all there is to it! (Not using our service? Check with your webmaster for an estimate for changing the title on each page.)

(By the way, Palio's makes awesome pizza, voted best in Frisco! Go visit, and tell 'em we sent you!)