How do I convince Google my site is about cats?

I've spent some time thinking about your question before fielding it because I think that there are some basic misunderstandings about how Google works, coupled with some SEO tricks on your site that can get you in trouble and, quite possible, banned from Google entirely.

Let's start with an explanation of how Google works: Google analyzes the content of your Web page -- and remember, Google looks at pages, not sites -- and uses what it calls your "keyword density" as one important factor in calculating how relevant your page is for a given search term.

In addition to the prose on your page, other important factors are your page title, the words in your headers, and the words that others use to link to your page. For example, if I link to your page as cats web then that reinforces that your page is about "cats web", whereas if I use "a great Web site about cats" then it suggests to Google that your page is more about cats and less about cats web, per se.

But there's a greater issue here that's worth mentioning: When I search for "cat" I find that there are 161 million matches, while a search for "cats web" produces only 24 million. A search that has 161 million matches is almost impossible to rank highly. 24 million is pretty huge too, so being in the top five is very good and nothing to be upset about.

So one part of my answer is then that sometimes you should just leave well enough alone. If you're findable by your customers with relatively narrow and specific searches that are relevant to your market segment, then I think you're doing alright. Even SEO people sometimes just admit that there's basically no way to rank in the top 20 for some keywords.

For example, Google "parenting blog" and you'll find that the #1 match is my Attachment Parenting Blog. That's out of 4.4 million matches. Search for "blog", however, and I'm nowhere to be found out of the staggering 440 million matches found.

I also mentioned that some of what you're doing on your site isn't a good idea. The example that jumped out at me was that duplicating the same keyword more than once in your keywords meta tag is called keyword stuffing and it's frowned upon by Google and other search engines.

Anyway, I hope this helps clarify how Google works, what you can reasonably expect with search engine optimization, and how your site can be cleaned up. The best thing you can do to have a good placement in search engine results is to create legitimate content pages on specific topics, and encourage others to link to your pages by using the keywords you want, not the name of your site or its URL.

And, if I may suggest it, I think you'd get a lot of value out of reading my new book Growing Your Business with Google, from Penguin Books.

Good luck!