Jude's Blog

I just noticed something today and felt the need to share it.  When you go to a search engine like Google and type in a search term, do you know how Google finds pages that have that term?  It looks at the title of the page as well as content and keywords within that page.  Many say that meta tags are now useless, but of the sites I have looked through that don’t have them, they do not rank well in any Google search.

I did a search and was surprised when a site I frequent wasn’t anywhere in the first 6 pages of Google, so I went to that site and looked at it.  The first thing I noticed was that they only had the name of the company in their title.  Without a description of the company, only a direct search for that name will result in a find.  The next thing I noticed was no meta tags at all, as well as no where on the page a listing of what the site offered or sold.

THAT is why the site doesn’t show up in searches, and that is probably why it doesn’t do better in sales than it does.  One of the first things I learned when I studied SEO was that you MUST put a description in your site title.  My site used to just have “Jude’s Place features novels by Jude Liebermann”.  At least that is better than just having “Jude’s Place”, but I wanted to let my viewers know that I give away a free romance novel, so I added that to my title.  Now, I want my visitors to know I write erotica, so I have included that in my title.  It does appear that Google places the most emphasis on the title of the pages it indexes, so it is vital that title be descriptive. So now my site’s title is “Jude Liebermann’s sensual/erotic romance novels plus free stories”, which just about covers everything.

Having the meta tags and keywords in the content are second most important.  Just make sure the content matches the meta tag keywords, or Google might slap you down for it.  Many sites have tried inflating their meta tags with fake keywords so they get traffic for things they don’t even have on their site. Google has adjusted their algorithm to compensate. While I do not believe that means they totally ignore the meta tags, they do check the rest of the page content to make sure they match.

Keep all the above tips in mind if you want to maximize the search potential for your site.