My Google Shrine is bogus

published by Fran Shea

What am I doing wrong? I devote myself to one search engine. ONE. There are so many more but my eye has never wandered. Sure, I played around a little bit with Yahoo – who didn’t? I just feel like this relationship is completely one-sided. I do. I give and give, search and search and when I FINALLY search for me, I get nothing but pages and pages of other letterpress studios. UM, that makes me ill. Listen, google: (If that is your real name) You either put me first or it’s over. That’s me; Zeichen Press. A design and letterpress studio in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Maker of fun and funny greeting cards and disc sleeves for one and all.

0 thoughts on “My Google Shrine is bogus”

  1. The song, “What Have You Done for Me Lately” by Janet Jackson comes to mind.

    Google will care and give you more if you do something for it.
    Maybe writing poetry about it?
    Or Shopping on Google?
    A trip to Geneva?

    I.E. Just searching isn’t enough anymore as you’ve been doing that all this time.

    “What have you done for Google lately.”

    BTW, I visited your site and it’s missing “description”, “abstract” and “keywords” meta tags in the header. These generally improve search engine rankings (though “keywords” is not as important these days). Google likes it when the “description” and “abstract” tags contain content that is relevant to the pages. Google will like you even more if you have several high profile sites linking directly to your studio as well.

    I don’t know the Big Cartel stores are customized, so this could be as simple as adjusting your template or as complicated as getting a programmer.

    Could be just as motivating as a trip to Geneva if these are implemented.

    1. When a site is first created, the HTML code in each page should have these tags.

      These are descriptors telling search engines what your site is all about.

      Search engines like these descriptors because that allows them to easily index your site with certain keywords. So each time someone searches for “letterpress studios”, your chances of being higher up on their index also rises.

      Normally web designers include these tags in web pages when the build the site, but since you’re using Big Cartel, it may be a bit more involved. Like I said, I don’t know how they handle templates.

      If you know how to change the content of zeichenpress.com, since that appears to be a separate page, you should include “description”, “keyword” and “abstract” tags in the HTML.

      You can get a good overview of meta tags over at Wikipedia

      The other alternative would be have affiliate links back to your site. Maybe you can convince some of your customers to link back to the studio if they have sites of their own. This will increase your page rank over time and will give you a better chance of being in one of the first few pages of a Google search.

      The ideal goal, of course, is to be on the first page of a search.

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