How dos Google work?

[showboat]

I am in the process of uppdating my web site. When I do a google search I am on page 9.

Does anyone have any ideas or tips on how to get higher on the search as I have no idea how the search engines work?

Thanks

[Mosaic]

Look at your metatagging - have you included lots of highly relevent keywords? And a pithy description? And have you made sure each page has a title ('Untitled page' at top of broswer is a real no-no).

[Mosaic]

Google works by little programs seeking online the words that people type in.

[showboat]

Thanks Mosaic. I think I have done the keywords. Someone told me that the amount of pages you have helps too. Do you know if this is true?

You can take a look and tell me what you think if you can. It is:
www.lovelittlewhiskybottles.co.uk

Thanks

[rojash]

Well, you don't seem to have any metatags for keywords or for description, so adding those would help.

[showboat]

Ok, I am a complete novice at this. What is a metatag?

[rojash]

You could also make the site a lot more friendly and faster loading by resizing your images before uploading them. For example, on th "About Me" page, the first image is displayed at 369x204, but the actual image size is 2101x1081 which means that when someone visits that page they have to wait while each of the enormous images (the second is 1308x1852) is downloaded, and yet, as soon as the image arrives, their browser has to resize it.

If you want an image to display at a certain size, it's much better to reduce it locally then upload the reduced image for display. That way the visitor only need to download the reduced image (which is what they'll eventually see anyway), and the whole page will load much quicker.

[Mosaic]

What a lovely idea...I'll start at A and see how long I'm conscious for.....

I've looked at your source code and I'm not seeing what you need there. The important ones to have are

<meta name="description" content="Write a grammatical sentence here. This appears in the google summary">
<meta name="author" content="add your name here">
<meta name="keywords" content="here you can add any number of random words, separated by a comma but no spaces">

That should get you noticed.

[boxtops]

my computer doesn't resize the photos, it just displays them on top of the text (e.g. on the aboutme page).

Have you seen this one? http://www.minibottleclub.co.uk/members.html

[rojash]

A meta tag just contains special information about the page.
Go to your website
Right-click in the page and choose View Source
You'll see near the top some lines that begin <meta
You need to add a line similar to:
<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Some descriptive text here"
and a line similar to
<META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="A word or phrase that people might enter when searching for sites like this, another word or phrase, etc"

[Mosaic]

Incidentally showboat, the number of pages you have only has any relevance if the metatagging is getting seen by the web crawlers - the little internet searchers.

[showboat]

Oh Gosh, this is all complicated stuff to me. How do I add in the info?

I have right clicked to view source, but it won't let me add.

I am so sorry if I appear stupid.

I will work on the about me page :)

[Mosaic]

I've emailed you Showboat