Memphis Marketing and Advertising

In the beginning, search engines would read whatever was placed on the website but would also read whatever was hidden in the code. SEO companies and web designers would hide text in the pages that only the search engine spiders would read. Meta tags, like the “keywords” meta tag, were used to list words so that the website should show up under those searches. Unfortunately, people abused these methods and put non-relevant keywords on the site to increase traffic. To alleviate this abuse, the Google founders devised the PageRank method of search engine spidering. Their spiders surf the web and rank sites according to how many links link to that page. They still use the site’s content, but they make sure that they only use what’s visible to the consumer. This way, they force designers to only use relevant content on their sites. Meta tags for keywords are utterly useless. Title and Content tags are still used but only because they show up in the title bar and in the search results. They can be read by anyone searching the internet.

Of course, with PageRank came a whole new set of problems. Websites called link farms sprang up all over the web promising higher search results by linking your site with them. These sites would be nothing more than huge sites with no content and nothing but links on them. Their strategy was that they could increase the PageRank of sites by adding links on these link farms. Fortunately Google has once again stepped it up and is using new technology to rank pages and sift through link farms. Now, link farms can be penalized or not counted by Google, and sites with links on these sites can be penalized as well.

So it comes down to the obvious answer to search engine problems. Build your websites to web standards, use text links, obtain links from reputable, relevant sites similar to yours, and finally, write content that is keyword rich and relevant to the consumer. This equation will almost always succeed and keep you out of the Google doghouse.