How Google Sees Your Website
When someone looks for the goods and services you offer at your Jacksonville business, the search engines compare the words they type into the search box with the websites their programs — the “spiders” — have visited and indexed. They use an algorithm to decide which sites are the best match and give the searchers a list of sites that best fit their query.
If Google and Bing don’t get what your website is about, they won’t offer you to the right searchers.
How can you tell what the search engines think you’re about?
Google’s Adwords Keyword Selection Tool lets you put your web address into a search tool and then gives you the keywords that Google thinks would work well for you. Essentially, the tool tells you what Google thinks your website is about. Recently, we ran this tool for a website targeted toward restaurant managers. Google thought that keywords like “quit smoking” and “smoking cessation” were the best choices for this website. Obviously, this site isn’t getting the right kinds of visitors, and the company isn’t getting customers from the website.
The SEOMoz Term Extractor is a similar tool that analyzes your site and gives you a list of one-, two-, and three-word phrases that look like important keywords on your website. The results won’t precisely match those at the Adwords Keyword Tool, so it’s worth running both.
Now you know what the search engines think your website is about. How does your site look to a search engine spider?
No colors, no flash, no multimedia. Most of that is ignored by search engines. If your site has lots more code than it needs or very few words, your text will seem less important than the code. You don’t want that.
Use CTRL+U to examine the code. You can also use the Lynx viewer to see how your site looks without images or styling; this may be more useful to you if you’re not familiar with HTML code.
Correctly built websites with well-optimized content will perform better than poorly built, unoptimized sites. Use these tools to evaluate your business website and see how it looks to search engines. Then contact Oyova to improve it.