Fun with search engines…or why the title of this site changed today

Hello, my name is Kelly Adams….and I’m a searchaholic.

I like to Google. Google is my friend. Well, most of the time its my friend. Until, that is, I search for myself on the vast frontier land that is the Internet. Go ahead, try it yourself: search for “Kelly Adams” (use the quotes). You won’t find my presence on the web on page one…or page two…or even page five. In those first few pages, you’ll discover an actress named Kelly Adams and some fan sites for her, a couple of authors of pornography with the name “Kelly Adams”, and some other sites I just don’t have the time to look at. But my site is somewhere in the Google results: keep looking…on page 12 or so. Now try uber geek “Kelly Adams”. There I am, page one. Or “Kelly’s World”: there my site is again, page one.

I don’t mind being considered an “uber geek”: I’m proud of my nerdiness. And maybe I belong on page 12 due to popularity? Well, let’s have some more fun with Google. Try searching for “Teresa Noreen”. You’ll find my web site on page one, maybe page two.

Waitaminnit….my site is *entirely* about Kelly Adams. Its who I am. I’ve mentioned Teresa a few times, and she’s a wonderful person…but if you are looking for “Kelly Adams”, you should find my site somewhere more prominently than page twelve versus page two for someone who happens to be mentioned on my site. I’m not trying to misrepresent my site at all: in fact, I’m trying to get the search engines to recognize what its about a bit more intelligently.

So, what to do? Meta-tags, at least the ones originally designed for search engine use (E.G.: the “keywords” tag) are pretty much useless. All the major search engines pretty much ignore them. And my current challenge isn’t about Google page rank: improving that is largely going to happen based on me having interesting content and other folks “rewarding” that content by mentioning me in their sites. And I’m really not wanting to get into the whole “search engine optimization” thing: folks write books and teach courses about it, and what it all seems to boil down to is people claiming to have a “trick” to jigger the system…that’s not what I want.

The best advice I have been able to find suggests that the thing to change is the “title” meta tag. A cool website name is great, but if the title also says what your site is about, it serves double duty. And its a key part of how the search engines index a site.

So, my site’s title has now changed. Its a bit long (“Kelly’s World- A View into the mind of Uber Geek, Kelly Adams”), but hopefully sometime in the next few months typing “Kelly Adams” into Google will show my site somewhere in the first five pages at least.

UPDATE: Google has apparently already updated their indexes; do a Google Search on “Kelly Adams”…this site is (as of this moment) on page one, 7th item down. Hurray!

Technorati Tags: Google, Search engines, Title tag