Solving the Mystery of Search Engines and Rankings

 Part One: Metatags

Q: Last year I spent thousands of dollars for a new Web site, but it never seems to show up in a search engine! How will people find my company if the search engines refuse to cooperate?

A. Maintaining a Web site that consistently ranks well in search engines can be a fulltime job! There are thousands of search engines and directories, each with its own ranking system. And just when they think you’ve figured out their current formulas, they’ll change the algorithms. They want the key to their top rankings to remain a mystery, so they intentionally make it impossible to adhere to a formula.

But there are some fundamental good practices you can use to increase your chances of being found near the top. They involve the background coding in your site, the public content of your site, and actual submission to the engines and directories themselves. Programming a site to rank high in search results is called “Search Engine Optimization” or SEO.

First, understand how search engines (or directories) gather information about your site. Most use “bots” or “crawlers” to assess the relevance of your site’s coding to the answers its users seek. Once an engine knows your site exists (a topic we will address later), it will send its tentacles into your site to pull placement information. The more relevant your background coding and public content are, the higher you will rank. Therefore it’s vitally important your site be coded to maximize its search engine potential. This article will deal with the first background coding fundamental: metatags.

Metatags (also called metacontent) are keywords, descriptions, and other positioning items which may be hidden from view in a Web browser, but are often the first thing a search engine reviews when it comes time to deciding where your site should be placed in its results.

Curious about whether your site has good metatags? You can view your site’s coding like this: Go to your homepage. At the top of your browser window, you’ll find FILE, EDIT, VIEW, and other commands. Choose VIEW, and from the menu that drops down, choose VIEW SOURCE or VIEW PAGE SOURCE. If you are using a PC, you might be able to right-click in the middle of your homepage to find the same options. This will open a text window that shows you all the coding that makes up your homepage.

If you can’t find your metatags, ask your developer where they are since it’s possible they’ve been included elsewhere. If your developer can’t answer your question, consider finding a new developer, because not including metatags in the coding of your site would be the equivalent of not installing a front door to your house.

Near the top of the resulting text page, you should find lines that begin with META NAME followed by the type of metatag it is. Among the most important metatags for SEO are KEYWORDS and DESCRIPTION.

Your KEYWORDS should be the words people will most likely type into the search bar when they are looking for your goods or services. Make sure they are words and phrases potential customers might use, in the order they would use them, and not necessarily the words you would use to describe your company.

Different engines have different limits on the number of keywords they will read. Limiting the number of characters you use to 135 is a good rule of thumb. Using more won’t help; in fact, some engines will lower your ranking if you exceed this limit.

Your DESCRIPTION can be like a title, but seeding it with some of your keywords will be helpful. Again, limit its length, and don’t waste your characters with words that won’t be helpful to people who want to find your site. Proper coding of metatags is only the first step in SEO.

(Link to Part II: Site Content)

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