Getting the most out of being crawled: Tags, Keywords and Title

Back in April of 2007 David Sifry reported on the Technorati blog: "Technorati is now tracking over 70 million weblogs, and we're seeing about 120,000 new weblogs being created worldwide each day. That's about 1.4 blogs created every second of every day." Tags have become an important part of indexing all that new content. If we want people to read what we write, we have to do our part to make our content as accessible as possible -- and intelligent tagging is an important part of that.

Tags are one of the primary keys used to store and retrieve content when somebody does a search. Right now there are ten search engines crawling the ePluribus Media community site, but only about 18% of our traffic is coming in from search results. Getting a good page rank in search engine results is a combination of three things ...

• title
• tags
• and keywords

... and their relevance to the content in the page.

Title

This is the first stop for the spiders that are crawling the site. The title should contain at least one of the tags and one of the keywords and be pertinent to the contents of your commentary. In other words, what would somebody type into the search engine to find your commentary.

Tags

Here on the ePluribus Media community site, we have people that subscribe to feeds on a specific tag, so that each time a new commentary is posted using that tag, they are alerted. Tags are also used to rate and index your commentary for inclusion in search results. By using a "keyword" in both the title and the tags section you are increasing the page rank in search results.

Keywords

Basically, every word in your commentary is a keyword, but the search engines will look for words that have weight (eliminating words like and, but, for etc.) and then compare those words with the title and tags. For instance, this commentary is about tags, so I started off with including the word "tags" in my title. I then repeated it in the commentary tags and again in the subtitle [h1 tags]. I have since repeated it numerous times in this commentary. "ePluribus Media" will be the second "primary tag" for this commentary as I have used it in a similar fashion. Search Engine Watch offers this description ...

One of the the main rules in a ranking algorithm involves the location and frequency of keywords on a web page. Call it the location/frequency method, for short.

[snip]

Search engines will also check to see if the search keywords appear near the top of a web page, such as in the headline or in the first few paragraphs of text. They assume that any page relevant to the topic will mention those words right from the beginning.