Hi Bobdic!
Search engine optimization is a very broad field, of which keywords
are an important part. It is widely agreed amongst search engine
experts that high quality descriptive content is vital for a site to
do well in search results. This is because Google and some other
search engines do not look at meta-tag keywords, and instead analyse
the text of the page to determine relevant keywords. This makes it
difficult to specifically state which search terms will or will not
yield your site as a result; a deeper discussion of Google's workings
is required.
Search engines index the content of the Internet using software called
a 'spider'. The spider will jump from site to site through
hyperlinks, just as a human reader would do, and records the content
it finds. When you submit a URL to Google manually, your site is
added to a list of additional places the spider will visit. The
spidering process, sometimes referred to as the 'Google Dance', occurs
roughly once per month, hence the delay between site submission and
appearance in the listings.
To determine whether or not your site has been indexed by Google yet,
simply use 'www.vermeersriddlerevealed.com' as a search term. At the
moment, your site is not listed, and the results page displays:
"Sorry, no information is available for the URL
www.vermeersriddlerevealed.com"
However, once vermeersriddlerevealed.com has been listed, you will be
given four options:
"
* Show Google's cache of www.vermeersriddlerevealed.com
* Find web pages that are similar to www.vermeersriddlerevealed.com
* Find web pages that link to www.vermeersriddlerevealed.com
* Find web pages that contain the term
"www.vermeersriddlerevealed.com"
"
So you should have no problem finding out when you have made it into
the index. Clicking on the fourth option of these results will show
you the number of pages linking to your own - an important point which
I shall return to later in my answer.
Back to the spidering, you can see what a search engine spider will
make of your site by inputting the URL in the spider simulator at
http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/sim_spider.cgi. The
following is the information gleaned from the index.html of
www.vermeersriddlerevealed.com.
"
WHAT IS IT ABOUT VERMEER? WHY ARE HIS IMAGES SO GRIPPING AND
MEMORABLE? WELCOME to the HOME PAGE of www.VermeersRiddleRevealed.com
You have reached the website that reveals a centuries-old secret. The
Dutch master artist Jan Vermeer (1632-1675) used a secret, forbidden
geometric formula to compose several of his masterpieces. This 17th
century genius has been called "The Sphinx of Delft" (Holland) --
because his paintings have presented hitherto unsolvable riddles for
experts attempting to explain definitively the captivating appeal of
Vermeer's work. The eight masterpieces named at left have been
analyzed geometrically . . . and . . . Here and now -- for these eight
-- Vermeer's Riddle is Revealed! You may click on the "LEARN MORE"
link below -- then on the paintings named at left J. Vermeer - As
Painted As analyzed by R. diCurcio A geometric analysis of “The
Astronomer” (above) and “The Geographer” (below) reveals that Vermeer
positioned the features of each composition to conform to the Grail
Geometry. Find out why the left hand of each Netherlandish genius is
symbolic of the concealment of The Holy Grail. Learn more! Learn
the Grail Geometry and view the masterpieces that reveal how Vermeer
used the Grail Geometry in these eight of his thirty-five surviving
paintings. From the book "VERMEER'S RIDDLE REVEALED" by
Robert A. diCurcio, 2001 AETERNIUM Publishing , P.O. Box 1451,
Nantucket, MA 02554-1451 send an email Learn More ??
"
Inspecting the results of the spider simulation, you can pick out what
are likely to be keywords decided upon by Google. Words such as
'the', 'and', and 'is' can be ignored, but other terms will be given
more analysis. Frequency of occurrence of each term is an important
indicator of a page's subject to a search engine spider. So, for the
above example, 'Vermeer', 'geometric', riddle', and 'grail' are
particularly strong themes. However, for the keyword 'art', the are
no inclusions within the text, and a search for a combination of terms
including 'art' will be much less likely to return your site.
The obvious remedy to this situation is to think about which keywords
you want to be particularly strong with, and to use these to a
moderately high degree in your site content. I should warn you at
this point *not* to 'spam' Google with excessive repetition of
keywords. A trick sometimes used by webmasters is to include huge
lists of keywords in size zero or transparent font hidden on the page.
This may be successful in the short-term, but will ultimately lead to
Google banning your site from the index. So again, this is
ill-advised.
At the moment your site is very search engine friendly; not too much
fancy HTML or unnecessary code, clear titles, good descriptive text,
and breaking none of the search engine 'rules'. One suggestion I
would make though would be to take advantage of the alternative text
tags for images. Google uses these as well as written content to
determine keywords for the site. You can insert alternative text by
simply adding the following HTML within <IMG... ...> tags:
ALT="A description of the image using some of your desired keywords"
You can emphasize the importance of certain words to a search engine
or reader by enclosing them in <strong> </strong> or <b> </b> tags.
However, this will also effect the visual impact of the page, so it is
best not to go over the top with font weight alterations.
Google are very secretive about the exact workings of their search
algorithms, so it is impossible to tell exactly how many keywords will
be recorded for a specific site. However, as an educated guess, I
would suggest somewhere in the area of 40-100.
In specific answer to your question, "How do I know exactly which
keywords GOOGLE will use?", as I mentioned above, Google does not
refer to keyword meta-tags. However, some other search engines still
do, and the widely used guideline is that only the first 1000
characters of your keywords (including spaces and punctuation) will be
recorded. A brief guide to meta-tags is given at:
Jesset.com: search engines: meta tags
http://www.jessett.com/web_sites/search_engines/metatags.shtml
Earlier in my answer, I mentioned counting the number of sites linking
to yours. This is important with regards to Google's results ranking
mechanism 'PageRank'. A description of the PageRank (PR) algorithm is
available here:
Google Technology
://www.google.com/technology/
Essentially, the PR of your site, and hence your position on the
results page, is determined by the number of links to your site.
Pages with a high PR themselves will count more strongly towards your
PageRank than those with a lower rank. So how do you increase your
PageRank? This is another large area of discussion, especially since
Google is the current market leader.
A good place to start gathering links, is to contact webmasters of
sites related to yours, and ask them to display a link to you on their
site. A certain degree of link swapping might be necessary at this
stage. Including a link to your site in your signature when writing
to forums or online publications is another valid technique. A third
useful method is submitting your site for listing in online
directories such as:
Yahoo Directory: Suggest a URL
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/
Open Directory Project: Add a site
http://dmoz.org/add.html
Given the relatively unusual theme of your site, and hence low
competition for your keywords, I would suggest that with a little bit
of work, you could rank very highly once you are indexed. In a
month's time, if you have not appeared in the Google index yet, it may
be worthwhile resubmitting your site at:
Google: Add URL
://www.google.com/addurl.html
There is no penalty for multiple submissions. On the subject of
penalties, Google will not list a site if they discover the use of
services such as Web Position Gold or Link Exchange to try and cheat
the PageRank system. The best way to stay listed on Google is to
simply swap links with related sites, and not to try and trick the
system.
Further details of the concepts I have discussed above can be found at
sites such as:
Search Engine World
http://www.searchengineworld.com/
Search Guild: Google
http://www.searchguild.com/viewforum.php?f=1&sid=06aa8600d65505aae97fa5ce1f4dcf30
Webmaster World
http://www.webmasterworld.com/
In particular, the following article stresses the importance of
considering keywords when writing text for your site.
Designing a High Search Engine Rankings Page
http://www.searchengineworld.com/tips/doit.htm
Reference to Google's guidelines for webmasters would probably be time
well spent:
Google Information for Webmasters
://www.google.com/webmasters/
I hope that you find this answer both useful and interesting. If you
would clarification of any area please do not hesitate to ask before
rating my answer.
Good luck with your web site building!
mcfly-ga :)
**Search strategy**
google pagerank
google webmasters advice
search engine optimization OR optimisation
keywords "meta tags"
google "search results" |
,
0 Comments
)