A page's description meta tag gives Google and
other search engines a summary of what the page is about. Whereas a page's
title may be a few words or a phrase, a page's description meta tag might be a
sentence or two or a short paragraph.
Description meta tags are important because
Google might use them as snippets for your pages. Adding description meta tags
to each of your pages is always a good practice in case Google cannot find a
good selection of text to use in the snippet.
Like the Title attribute, you can change or
add a description to your page in the source code. This is what it would look
like:
<meta name="description"
content="Gastronom.ie is your single source for all things Irish Food and
Drink. Containing delicious recipes, restaurant reviews, world cuisine and all
types of comparisons of wine, beer and everything else." />
Body of the page
The body of each page on your website will
be examined by Google too. It will compare the content here to the title of the
page. If they match/suit each other then it will consider that the page and
content are well structured.
Headers
Headers on a page are also important, treat
them almost like chapters or section titles in a book. If you can be
descriptive of the content of the trailing paragraphs, it's good for readers
and it's also good for Google
Links
Google excels at automating processes and
removing as many humans as possible from the mix, yet if it wasn't for humans,
Google wouldn't have done so well. Google changed search forever when it stated
that a site or webpage that gets a lot of links should get more attention from
them and rank better. A link can be seen as a vote for a page. The more links,
the more it probably should be seen as valuable/worthy. Websites that get a lot
of links do well in search results. On closer inspection it is more in-depth in
that though.
Volume of links
The number of links is good. Most links are
good. More links, if Google trusts them is good for your site and lifts the
boat in a way. However, if the links are more focused with their text and come
from very trusted sites, your site can do better again.
Linking text
The text in a link pointing to your website
or webpage is very very important. Your website can actually do well for search
results for certain keywords even if they are not in your page title or in the
body of your page. This can be done by other websites linking to you with
keywords in the text of the link. This is why the Irish Communications
Regulator (ComReg) ranks first in Google for "telecoms poodle" or why
George Bush was number 1 for months for the phrase "miserable
failure"
Link weight
In addition, a well ranking website will
boost you more than websites that don't rank as well. A blog that nobody links
to might not impact your search rankings if they link to you but if Trinity College
Age of website
The older your website, the more Google
will see it as having some weight or credentials. With the ease of registering
and uploading a website, a website can appear online within minutes of a news
event happening with keywords about that news event. Sites like these spring up
in order to act like traps for people who will visit and will be directed to
click on sneaky ads and make the site money. Google realises this and so does
not give as much weight (and many times no weight at all) to new websites. Your
new domain could very well end up in the Google "sandbox" for weeks
or months until Google begins to trust it. If your site gets links from
credible websites, the time in the sandbox can shorten quite a lot.
Freshness
Google lives and thrives on content and
especially likes new content. If you update your website on a regular basis,
Google will come and visit you on a more regular basis. Google is now
apparently visiting sites every few minutes and content from some sites will
appear in search results within 15 minutes of the content being created. Keeping your website updated and fresh will
get rewarded by Google but in addition it will get rewarded by people who will
also come back to you.
Google.ie/Google local
You may have noticed (In Ireland) that you
are redirected to Google.ie when you go to Google.com. Google wants people to
use the local version of their search engines as they see local content as
being of more value to people in that geographic location. A lot of what people
search for can be addressed by local websites and local businesses. To make it
more valuable, Google guesses as to the Irishness of a website. If you have a
.ie domain name like Mulley.ie then Google says you are probably Irish. In
addition if the machine/web server where your website resides is owned by a
known Irish entity then Google says you or your site are probably Irish too.
What Google does then is reward you in Google.ie search listings. You get an
extra nudge in the local versions of Google. You are not punished though in the
Google.com listings.
You can also tell Google you are Irish or
even part of your site is Irish using the Google Webmaster tools which you
install/integrate with your website. That way, Irish sites who have special
Spanish or German sections of their websites can do well in Google.ie for most
of their site and do well for the Spanish section in Google.es and well for the
German section in Google.de We don’t go into Google Webmaster Tools here as
that’s an entire document in itself.
There is no secret to rank well but...
Google themselves tell you that writing
good and engaging content without using dodgy shortcuts is what will get you
traffic from them and they're correct. In addition, links, the currency of the
web are given out by people, You can write content that is loved by Google and
it being a machine might not spot it's gibberish but a human will and may not
link to it and may not visit it. A site that doesn't get links and visits might
alert Google to it being not so valuable, despite appearing to the machine as
being well structured and written. Of course Google is probably not far off
being able to spot human readable content...
