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| Understanding Google – Part 1 |
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Many legal web site owners understand the importance of Google and frequently use the search engine but don’t really understand how it works. In this series of articles I will try and educate you on some of the important things you should understand as a web site owner.
First – understanding what Google displays
Let’s take a look at the results page of Google after you have performed a search and understand what is being displayed and where it gets the information.
As an example, if you do a search using www.google.com.au for the word "findLaw Australia" you will get a list of results, starting with a listing for the Findlaw Australia web site.
The first line of the result "FindLaw Australia" is highlighted in blue or purple (if you have already been to this site recently) and hyperlinks back to your web site.
Now how did it decide to display the words "FndLaw Australia"? The words have been taken from the 'Title' meta tag that sits in the background code of your web page. Your web developer adds these tags for you; they cannot be seen on your site page, they are instead hidden in the HTML code behind your web page.
You can view this HTML code if you go to any of your web pages, right click on your mouse and choose the option "view source". You can now see the HTML code of the web page and the 'Title' tag should be somewhere near the top.
The 'Title' tag of your web page should include anywhere from 3 to 9 words and include keywords that describe the page and influence people to click on your page. Google places some value on the words that are in this 'Title' tag as part of its overall score for your web page, which it uses in its page algorithm. So some site owners identify keywords they wish to target and include them in these Meta tags.
The next set of words, (The leading legal resource for Australian...) is a description of what the page entails and has been taken from the Meta tag, again in the HTML code of your web page.
The word highlighted in bold identifies a direct match with one of the words in your search query.
Both the 'Title' and 'Description' Meta tags can be unique to each page of your web site. Unique Meta tags for each page of your web site can take some time to prepare, but can be helpful with the optimisation of your web page. Importantly it can increase your click through rates, as well written tags, will influence the searcher to click on your site within the list of results.
If you do not include the 'Title' and 'Description' Meta tags on your web pages, your Google results may not make sense to searchers or may not be very noticeable. So make sure your web developer has set them up correctly, though also be aware, by simply including keywords in Meta tags, you will not get your site to appear for related search terms. There are many other criteria’s to conform to as well, we will go into these criteria further in our series of articles on Google.
The green URL (starts with www.) under the description text is the unique page URL for the result being displayed. Sometimes it is your home page (just your URL) and sometimes it is a direct page within your web site that has matched the search being performed.
The "Cached" link will take you to a screenshot of the page that Google has stored, it may differ from what the page looks like now if the page has changed since Google indexed (read) your web site.
In Part 2 of our series on understanding Google, we will show you how to use Google to give your site a quick health check.
August, 2006
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