Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
As I understand, google does not check the meta tags present on your website but instead checks the textual content on you website (please correct me if I am wrong here).
My question is, How does Google know what keywords to associate with a website so that website will appear, somewhere, in the results that are displayed for any of those words?
Any help on this is much appreciated
That's a big question! For starters, G and the other engines look at the Title tag, the description tag, the Hx tags, the textual content of the page, incoming link text, possible incoming link theme, alt tags, title tags - not necessarily in that order.
What works for me is title and description tag first unless I have a lot of incoming links with the keyword in the link text which sometimes weighs more heavily than the title/description depending on how many other sites use the keyword and how they have use it. Then, H1 and H2 tags and sprinkled throught out the page text, at the beginning, middle and end of paragraphs, in the alt and title tags and, of course I try for incoming links that include my major keywords. Don't overdo it, you must make it readable and useful to your visitor or it may be caught in an algorithm as spamming which just one way to get dumped or lowered to the dungeon of rankings.
I would suggest a thorough perusing of our keyword forum [webmasterworld.com] because you don't want to be in a position of putting all your eggs in one basket ( just Google to the exclusion of Y! and MSN - or any other engines people may use).
If you get dumped from Google for some reason, at some time, you will be very pleased that you managed your optimization techniques for all the majors.
That really sounds like a misunderstanding of how search engines work.
Google doesn't "associate" only certain keywords with a website. Essentially, they index all of the words. We use the term "keywords" to mean specific words or phrases that we as site operators choose to emphasize, using techniques like those nancyb described above.
When a query is made, Google responds by returning a ranked list of pages the content of which appears to be relevant to the query. A search engine doesn't have to have a predetermined list of keywords pointing to a subset of pages "associated" with those words.
Google doesn't "associate" only certain keywords with a website. Essentially, they index all of the words.
And some words are more important or prominent than other words, depending on their frequency, location on the page, etc., so that your page is more likely to come up when people search for those words. How Google decides which words are more important is a proprietary algorithm that they don't talk about much in public. All we peons can do is make educated guesses based on what we observe in the search results.
