We hear it all the time. “I don’t know why, but my site doesn’t show up in Google. Why?” You need
Words That Tell What a Page Is About
It could be a lot of things, but there are some really obvious problems that keep a page from showing up where you want it to on Google. Some of the problems are really easy to fix. The biggest problem we see is that a page has no words to tell a search engine what a page is about. The spider (click on that link if you want to read more about a spider) has to guess the subject. And so they guess wrong, or they give up and go somewhere else.
1. Words are in graphics/pictures. You may have words that a human can read, but if they are in a picture or a header – as often happens in a logo – a search engine can’t read them.
The header on this page, for example, is a picture of the words “Dash Web Consulting”. We had to put what the page is about in other places. And we did.
2. The important words aren’t highlighted. There are certain things in the way a page is ‘coded’ that say, “These words are really important – and that’s what this page is about.”
3. You don’t stick to the subject at hand. If you try to put too much information on a page, the robot (another word for spider) will be all confused, and not know how to classify what you’ve written. Don’t ramble. Pick one theme – we call them keywords – and stick with it. If you have more to say, make another page. (And link to it, like we did with the word ‘spider’ on this page.)
4. There aren’t other hints on the page. Title tags, picture tags, links, words in bolded text, and other fun coding things assure the crawler (yet another word for spider and robot) that the page is what you say it is. On this page, you see that the words ‘page’ and ‘bold’ are highlighted quite naturally. If you looked in the code, you’d see that we also used them in tags and links. Go ahead. put your mouse over this word: word. See, it’s a link. Further assurance that this page is about something to do with words.
5. You’ve blocked the spider from getting to the words on your pages. There are lots of things that tell a spider to go away – in fact, there is actual code that does just that. But other stuff – like Flash graphics – can also serve as spider poison.
You don’t want Google and Bing and Yahoo! left guessing – or leaving – when it comes to your page contents. Let us show you how to get the search engines to come to your page, crawl around, understand exactly what you’ve written about, and get you on the search results page for the keywords you have chosen.