Web Site Promotion | Google – electronic card catalog | Web Site Promotion

Google is like a huge electronic card catalog when it comes to your web site promotion.

By John Lombaerde

You know about the importance of keywords on your site, but did you know that the title tag is probably the single most important piece of information on your site that determines search engine position?

Why is this true? Imagine a sci-fi scenario, where Google is an incredibly huge library with an electronic card catalog and a large, but finite number of electronic librarians that look like little robots.

People bring new electronic books every day to the electronic library, and give them to the robot librarians to index, and rank.

Note: this is precisely the situation you face when you try to get your web sites, articles, and blog posts indexed by Google.

In this sci-fi scenario, some of these electronic books have thousands of pages, and some are short with only a few pages. Some have many sections, or chapters. All of them have to be indexed, and stored so that anyone can retreive the contents, (even individual pages), on a moments notice.

This is no small job for the little electronic librarian robots who run around like crazy, filing all the information, when new information is submitted.

They have to be very fast to file the vast amount of information that is being added every day, and they try very hard to be as accurate as possible in their filing method, so nothing is ever lost.

Their indexing speed must be very fast, but that is nothing compared with the search or retreival speed required, which must be done in milliseconds.

If the books given to the robot librarians have a very descriptive title that uses keywords to describe the contents, and if there is a good jacket overview, with a good description, their job is very easy.

Unfortunately, some of the authors keep making it difficult for the poor robot librarians. They show up with a book that has the title of “Home”, or “My Web Site”, or the names of companies that no one has every heard of, so no one will ever ask for the book by the name of the unknown company or the unknown author.

The title of their book often does not correspond very well with either the jacket description, or the contents of the electronic book itself.

The electronic librarians want to use the resources at their disposal as efficiently as possible, but when someone gives them books that has the title of “Home” or another non-descript title, their job becomes very difficult.

They really can’t afford to spend the time to read the entire book, but sometimes they must go inside the covers because have to determine how to index the book. Without any guide as to what it is about, they will just take whatever words appear the most often in the material.

They probably will be reluctant to do a reindex of the material as they might like to do, since every one’s electronic book is updated on a fairly regular basis. They just can’t afford to waste resources on books that are poorly indexed. They may only revisit the site once a month, or even longer, because it is a waste of their resources.

On the other hand, they are happy to revisit other electronic books that have good descriptive information in all in the right places. Even if the information if updated every day, it just take them milliseconds to find the information they need in order to index and rank them correctly, and accurately.

The content of these books is very well organized. They even have a special page that tells the little robot librarians where all the information is. They indicate to them what is important for them to read, and what is unimportant, so the librarian robots can do their job very quickly and efficiently.

Now you know why it is so important to have a well optimized title, and well as a well optimized site, with relevant and consistent content in the title, descriptions, body text, etc., and a good robot.txt file to let the Google robots know how to index your site.

The title tag is the place where the most concise, specific, keyword information is located to describe the contents of your web pages.

That is why this terse description appears as the first line of search engine results for each search performed on Google.

This is a slight over simplification, of course. I hope it gives a good picture of what happens when Google visits an optimized web site, and a web site that has not given any consideration to optimization.

I hope this description has provided a good introduction of what basic search engine optimization, and web site promotion is all about.

Thank you for your attention to this rather long post.

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Tagged as: Google, Search engine optimization, Web Site Promotion