It took several months of experimentation – adjustments then waiting then some more adjustments and some more waiting… but in the end I figured out how to get in to Google’s web definitions with the Google define: operator.
The first thing I did was create a page on my own website Insulation Grants UK called glossary.php and give it a title with keywords that suggested it was a source of definitions, aka a glossary and the same with the heading tags inside the body followed by a short paragraph describing the document as a glossary with more keywords.
The next step was to use some HTML specifically designed for the purpose of definitions, the definition list whose syntax is:
<dl>
<dt>Definition Term 1</dt>
<dd>description of definition term 1…</dd>
<dt>Definition Term 2</dt> <dd>description of definition term 2…</dd>
<dt>Definition Term 3</dt>
<dd>description of definition term 3…</dd>
</dl>
After this was complete, I wrote some definitions up using the format:
Definition term: definition term at the beginning of the sentence, all lowercase followed by the description along side here.
The above content was still within the correct definition list tags.
I waited for about 6 months as my site was new I was waiting for Google to trust my site. I done very little link building and concentrated on other onsite like internal linking and content issues. Until in the end I got impatient and thought I’d try something else.
I read about rel=”glossary” as rel is an attribute that gives search engines information about an element. In the link that contained the anchor text, “Glossary” I added rel=”glossary” so it looked like:
<a href=”/glossary/” rel=”glossary”>Glossary</a>
Then I waited another 2 months before checking to see if anything magic had happened. I typed into Google after the wait one of my definitions:
define: warm front scheme
And the following come back:
So given that the Warm Front Scheme is actually a government run initiative and has its own page on a .gov.uk domain I was quite surprised to see that Google was using my definition over information pulled from the UK government website which should hold a lot of authority.
It took a while to get Google to use my web definitions but that’s one of the things I love about Search Engine Optimisation – the anticipation. I’m pretty sure it was a culmination of all the signals I provided to give Google enough data that the information on my web page was worthy of appearing as Google’s web definition result for a particular term.
This blog was written over 6 months ago and Internet Marketing and is an always changing industry which means the information within this blog may be out of date. Use caution when using any methods or suggestions within it.
