A blog on blogging, computers and such

One way to learn about search engine optimization (SEO) is to learn from successful sites. I have found an example of good use of the HTML “title” and “meta”-tags.

If you search using Google, with the keywords “books” and “reviews”, you will find that the number one spot is occupied by http://www.reviewsofbooks.com/ . Why this site, you may ask, and not, for instance, New York Times Book Review, or Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or some other large corporation.

Well, there may be several answers. However, one part of the answer is good use of title and meta-tags. Look at this:

meta name="description" content="Links to free and publicly available professional reviews of recently released books"

meta name="keywords" content="book reviews, reviews of books, book review site, professional book review, fiction, nonfiction"

title>Reviews of Books - Book Reviews

So part of what is happening is that the site uses title and meta tags very, very efficiently! They have chosen an extremely narrow range of keywords, and optimized for just two words - namely “books” and “reviews”.

Now, when I said “part of what is happening”, I did it because another reason they score so well is that the site also is frequently linked to - checking with Google I found 1710 links to the site (please note that this is a relatively low number for a site ranking at the number one spot - the New York Times Book Review, which is ranked number two on the same search, by comparison has 10500 links to their site).

So, what’s the lesson: Decide what to optimize on for a given page, and use title and meta tags efficiently!