"How do we make my site show up when people search Google?". That's the single most asked question I hear at the beginning of every new website project. While the complete answer to that is long, involved, and continuously evolving, I'd like to touch on a few of the easiest things you can do yourself to make sure your site is getting proper recognition from Google.
What's Your Site About?
Years ago, Google and most other major search engines allowed the person who wrote the website code to tell the search engine what the site was about by coding in Meta Tags. These were words and phrases on the back end of the site not viewable by users, but seen by the search engine. While Meta Tags are still frequently used, they are now ignored by Google. Google made the decision to stop using them when site creators began using those words in a fashion contrary to Google's purpose of returning quality results. The Googlebot now uses the actual text from your pages to build its own meta description.
