Search Engine Things To Know - Google Your Web Part 1

I thought I'd put some posts about search engine basics out here.  If these topics have been covered by others on ActiveRain, please let me know.  I don't want to duplicate anything.  Also, please feel free to provide links to any other posts (on ActiveRain or not) that cover the same stuff.

There is a very simple way to get a feel for how your web site is being seen by the major search engine, Google.

Go to Google and type in your domain name (without the www).  For instance, try activerain.com.  You'll see this:

Google can show you the following information for this URL:

• Show Google's cache of activerain.com
• Find web pages that are similar to activerain.com
• Find web pages that link to activerain.com
• Find web pages from the site activerain.com
• Find web pages that contain the term "activerain.com"

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First, you'll see your web site title (usually from the title tag in the head of your home page code) followed by a brief description (i.e. "Lead distribution....").  This description can come from:

1. The description meta tag in the code of your home page,
2. A short description created by an editor of DMOZ.org (more on DMOZ in another post),
3. Content within your home page -- text in your navigation bar or text in h1/header tags. 
4. ATTENTION BLOG READER: If you know of other sources, please comment below.

After the description is the web address.

Next follows several bullets.  The first one is:

• Google's cache - This shows the last time google made cache (or copy) of your site.  If your site has been cached in the past few days, excellent.  If the cache has been in the past 15 days, good.  But if Google has not cached your site for months, then you have problems.  If anyone has this problem, post a comment, or e-mail me directly, and we'll do it as a case study blog post.

We'll cover the other bullets in Part 2.