Getting Listed on Google

Optimize A Web Site For Google

Getting a web site listed on Google can be a powerful tool to get steady traffic to your web site. Google is, after all, the most used search engine on the planet by a large margin.  Whether your web site was designed professionally or you dug it up yourself, every web site needs to be optimized for search engines.

Sending in a URL and information to Google might get your site indexed, but your web site won't get far.  You need to compete with thousands, possibly even a million other web sites out there for visitors.  Depending on how competitive in nature your web site theme is, proper optimization could be life or death for your web site's presence.

Meta Tags

Meta Tags, or meta content, was used widely by search engines in the 20th century as a way to instruct the search engines on under which keywords your web site should be listed.  It did not take long before web masters abused the system by adding keywords to their meta tags that were unrelated to their web site to appear more often in search results. Now, most search engines use other methods to get this information from your web site which is harder to abuse and fake.

Even though the larger search engines and directories today don't put as much emphasis on your meta tags as they did in the past, it's still a common practice to include them on your web pages anyway.  Even though meta tags aren't used for indexing like they used to, on major engines, they still look at the meta content for two reasons.

Permissions

The head content of your web site can be used to control what web spiders can and cannot do while crawling through your web site.  You can instruct web bots to crawl all the links on a particular web page or you can tell them that link crawling isn't allowed.  You also have the ability to tell Google and other search engines which web pages on your web site are acceptable to index and which are not.

Relevancy

The keywords and description of your meta content (meta tags) can still be used to determine how relevant the calculated keywords are to your web site.  Your meta content can be used to determine possible faked content if your meta tags and your site content don't match.

Whether you use meta tags for keywords and descriptions or not, they should still be used to direct permissions to search spiders where necessary to protect you and your web visitors.

The most powerful meta tag generator online is provided by SpyderScripts. Click here to use it, free!

Author

This field is optional.  This is the name of the person(s) who authored (created) the document which these meta tags will be used on.

Distributor

This field is optional.  This is the name of the person or company who is distributing the products or services and/or document itself.

Abstract

This field is optional.  This is a shorter version of the Description meta tag.  This is generally no longer than one sentence, and a short one at that.

Keywords

This field is required and is the most important meta tag.  These are comma and space separated values (example below) and are to be placed in order from left-to-right in order of keyword importance where the first keyword is the most important.

Example:
<meta name="keywords" content="free cgi scripts, cgi scripts, perl scripts, perl tutorials, perl, cgi, tutorials, chat room, meta tags">

If you have a large list of keywords, you should carefully choose only 20-25 keywords total to use.  Again, use the most important keywords you have.  The keywords meta tag should not exceed 950 characters in length including spaces and commas.

Description

This field is required.  This should be between one and three sentences and no more than 150 characters total.

For the search engines that use meta tags, the description tag is the text that appears when you search a given phrase in a search engine.  Since this is what the searcher sees, this is all they have to make a judgment on whether or not your site is worth clicking.

Pick your top selling points or top services or products and be sure to list these.  Do not jam the description tag with keywords; it's more important it's grammatically correct and in complete sentences.

Robots

This field is optional but strongly encouraged.  This instructs the search spider (or robot) on what it can and can't do.

Index will allow the spider to index your page into their listings.

Noindex will not permit the spider to index that page at all.

Follow will allow the spider to follow the links (both internal and external) and add these to their database.

Nofollow will not permit the spider to follow the links (either internal nor external) and add these to their database.

Distribution

This field is optional.  This is where your services or products are distributed/delivered to.  Either locally within your own city or state or globally.

Language

This field is optional but strongly encouraged.  Select the language contained within your website.

Rating

This field is optional.  This is the rating of your site.  Choose the appropriate rating from the pulldown menu.

Using content to get listed

Since the downfall of meta content with Google and other major search engines, a new way of search engines to predict your keywords and keyphrases is through textual content. Google has a very powerful algorithm that is used when their web crawler travels through your web site.  Although the algorithm and most of the details on what Google's search bot looks for is secret, one thing every SEO/SEM company agrees on is the need to have textual content throughout the web site.

If the page is important, it needs text to describe what it is and why it's important.  An image-only or flash-based web site may look pretty and professional but it will be extremely difficult to get listed by Google and other search engines if you don't have enough content.  Google is getting better at reading flash-based files.  It can read and parse between two and three flash frames which is more than the competing search engines but this stresses how important text is.

The number of words on a page isn't as important as the quality and density of the keyword and keyphrases related to a web site.   A few sentences of text will not supply enough data for Google to come up with accurate and usable information and will, more times than not, not use any keywords or keyphrases found on that web page.  The more text the page has, the more data Google can calculate and determine the important words.  A web page that has a page of text will typically have a higher page weight than a web page with only half a page.  This weight isn't only for Google to prepare accurate data but also to make it harder for web masters to fake their content in hopes to achieve a higher rating.

Keyword density

Keyword density is the number of times a word or phrase is repeated throughout the entire page. For example, a page that has 100 words that has the phrase "Google help" twice will have a keyword density of 2% for the phrase "Google help". The density is what Google and other search engines will look for in determining which keywords and keyphrases are important to the document.  If it is repeated more than other words and phrases, it's more than likely important and Google will use it as a keyword.

Regardless of the number of words or paragraphs on a page, a good keyword density for each search term is between 5-10%. If a word or phrase is repeated an extraordinary number of times, Google may consider it keyword spamming and that page will be penalized.  A keyword density less than 5% is not enough to be considered important and that word or phrase probably will not be selected by Google as a keyword or keyphrase.

Keyword density plays an important role with Google and how web pages are indexed. It is important to check your keyword density any time you make text changes on a web site.  There are many free keyword density checkers that can be used across the internet, one of the best ones is http://www.ranks.nl/tools/remote/.