Google Generation

Web sites are text files that exist on Web servers. These text files are much like the files created and used by word-processing software. To enable Web browsers such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Mozilla’s Firefox, or Opera to read these files, the files must be formatted according to a generally accepted standard. The standard used on the Web is HyperText Markup Language (HTML). HTML uses codes, or tags, that tell the Web browser software how to display the text contained in the text file.

For example, a Web browser reading the following line of text
A Review of the Book Wind Instruments
recognizes the and tags as instructions to display the entire line of text
in bold and the and tags as instructions to display the text enclosed by
those tags in italics.

When assessing a Web site for search engine optimization, one should review a number of elements, including site and page tagging, page content, site links, and the site map. Each of these elements is crawled by search engines to determine Web site ranking . Each of these elements should be addressed separately.

Site and page tagging. The HTML page title is today’s hands-down leader, and an Eternally Important factor, in search engine ranking algorithms.

In addition to the bold and italics tags used to format text, there is another tag on Web sites called the meta tag. Meta tags are included in the coding of a Web site and are essential to having the site listed properly in a search engine .

A META tag is HTML code that a Web page creator places in the page header for the specific purpose of informing Web robots about the content of the page. META tags do not cause any text to appear on the page when a Web browser loads it; rather, they exist solely for the use of search engine robots.

It is pointed out that the most important meta tags to a search engine are the title and the description tag. Schneider and Evans also discussed the use of meta tags, including a keyword meta tag. They stated that many search engines’ crawlers, spiders, or robots do not search an entire Web site. Some search engine robots collect information only from a Web page’s title, description, keywords, or HTML tags; othersread only a certain amount of the text in each Web page.

Schneider and Evans demonstrated the first few lines of HTML from a Web page that contains information about electronic commerce:


electronic commerce developments.”>
data interchange, value added reseller, EDI, VAR, secure socket layer, business
on the Internet”>

Developing the correct keywords to get a site ranked higher than others is a big part of organic search engine optimization. To develop the correct set of keywords, however, one must know which keywords searchers are using. There are many different ways to build a list of keywords, including brainstorming, looking at the competition, and using keyword-building tools. Wordtracker is the leading keyword research tool. Yahoo! and Google both have their own keyword-building tools.