Thursday, November 02, 2006

Get Google to crawl meta tags

Hi Annette,

I can't get Google to correctly crawl my meta tags.At least a month ago, I updated my meta tags on the following website: www.humorandwisdom.com as follows:

META name="title" content="Jokes and Riddles, Humor and Wisdom by Kuder.

META name="description" content="An organized and screened collection of jokes, riddles, puzzles, and lifestyle enhancing wisdom."

META name="keywords" content="Jokes and riddles, Joke, jokes, riddle, riddles, puns, Kuder, humor, wisdom, wealth, happiness, affirmation, affirmations, aphorism, aphorisms, rebus, rebuses, words of wisdom, positive affirmations, blonde jokes, blond jokes, Halloween jokes, Halloween riddles, Halloween humor, Christmas jokes, Christmas riddles, Christmas humor, jokes riddles, difficult riddles, hard riddles, answers to riddles, funny riddles, math riddles, logical riddles, funny puns, office humor."

When I put "humor and wisdom" into a Google search, it comes back with:
return to kuder's home page Jokes and Riddles, Humor and Wisdom by Kuder Click flag. Jokes The best of the best. Riddles The cream of the crop. Words of Wisdom Ditto! ...

The above are random words from my home page, but isn't what I submitted and isn't what I want my listing to say. Clicking on what Google cached, it reads:

This is G o o g l e's cache of http://www.humorandwisdom.com/ as retrieved on Oct 17, 2006 11:59:35 GMT.G o o g l e's cache is the snapshot that we took of the page as we crawled the web. I have re-submitted my website a couple of times. How can I get Google to get my meta tags right? Also, Google isn't picking up the other key words I submitted.

Roger

Hi Roger,

That's because Google doesn't use the description metatag as what they display in the results. If you had "humor and wisdom" in your description tag, which you don't, it might display that, but not necessarily.

When you enter a keyword phrase in Google's search it crawls all the content of your homepage or entire site (depending on your robots follow tag). What is displays in the results is text around that phrase that appears in the content of your page. You don't have "humor and wisdom" in your text of the page either.

Also, you don't have the phrase "humor and wisdom" in your keyword tag. In fact, your doing that tag all wrong. You should NEVER use single words as keywords. You should always use 2-4 word phrases. Second, those phrases need to be in the text/content of the page too. Third, you should only have 2-4 keywords in that metatag, with the most important one first.

When you say Google isn't picking up the other keywords you "submitted" are you meaning the ones in your keyword tag? Not sure what you mean here. Google hardly pays attention to metatags other than the title tag. Other search engines might, but you have to do your tags correctly, as I've described above.

Thanks for asking!

Annette Vaillancourt
Girl Geek Web Designs: Custom Web Design and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget
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1-877-866-4335

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