Submitting your URL to Google

Google is primarily a fully-automatic search engine with no human-intervention involved in the search process. It utilizes robots known as ‘spiders’ to crawl the web on a regular basis for new updates and new websites to be included in the Google Index. This robot software follows hyperlinks from site to site. Google does not require that you should submit your URL to its database for inclusion in the index, as it is done anyway automatically by the ‘spiders’. However, manual submission of URL can be done by going to the Google Google Addurl. This may speed up the indexing of your site but it is no guarentee. One important thing here is that Google does not accept payment of any sort for site submission or improving page rank of your website.

Cloaking

Sometimes, a webmaster might program the server in such a way that it returns different content to Google than it returns to regular users, which is often done to misrepresent search engine rankings. This process is referred to as cloaking as it conceals the actual website and returns distorted web pages to search engines crawling the site. This can mislead users about what they’ll find when they click on a search result. Google highly disapproves of any such practice and might place a ban on the website which is found guilty of cloaking.

Google Guidelines

Here are some of the important tips and tricks that can be employed while dealing with Google.

Do’s

• A website should be easy to navigate and have a crystal clear hierarchy.
• A site map is required to help the users go around your site and in case the site map has more than 100 links, then it is advisable to break it into several pages to avoid clutter.
• Find essential and precise keywords and make sure that your website features relevant and informative content.
• The Google crawler will not recognize text hidden in the images, so when describing important names, keywords or links; stick with plain text.
• The TITLE and ALT tags should be descriptive and accurate and the website should have no broken links or incorrect HTML.
• Dynamic pages (the URL consisting of a ‘?’ character) should be kept to a minimum because not every search engine spider is able to crawl them.
• The robots.txt file on your web server should be current and should not block the Googlebot crawler. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled.

Don’ts

• When making a site do not cheat the people who will surf your website. Do not provide them with irrelevant content or present them with any fraudulent schemes.
• Avoid tricks or link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking.
• Do not employ hidden texts or hidden links.
• Google frowns upon websites using cloaking technique. Hence, it is advisable to avoid that.
• Automated queries should not be sent to Google.
• Avoid stuffing pages with irrelevant words and content. Also don’t create multiple pages, sub-domains, or domains with significantly duplicate content.
• Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with hardly any original content.

Crawler/Spider Considerations

Also, consider technical factors. If a site has a slow connection, it might time-out for the crawler. Very complex pages (pages with all the bells and whistles) may time out before the crawler can harvest the text.

If you have a hierarchy of directories at your site, put the most important information high, not deep. Some search engines will presume that the higher you placed the information, the more important it is. And crawlers may not venture deeper than three or four or five directory levels.

Above all remember the obvious – full-text search engines index text. You may be tempted to use fancy and expensive design techniques that either block search engine crawlers or leave your pages with very little plain text that can be indexed. Don’t fall prey to that temptation.

The next post will look at some rules for getting better page ranking.

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Page rank calculations need to be performed about 40 times by the Google Search Engine. Because the index is so large, the calculations take several days to complete. While the calculations are taking place the search results fluctuate, sometimes minute-by minute. It is because of these fluctuations that the term, Google Dance, was coined. The dance usually takes place sometime during the last third of each month.

For the rest of the month, fluctuations sometimes occur in the search results, but they should not be confused with the actual dance. They are due to Google’s fresh crawl and to what is known “Everflux”.

Google has two other searchable servers apart from www.google.com. They are www2.google.com and www3.google.com. Most of the time, the results on all 3 servers are the same, but during the dance, they are different.

For most of the dance, the rankings that can be seen on www2 and www3 are the new rankings that will transfer to www when the dance is over. Even though the calculations are done about 40 times, the final rankings can be seen from very early on. This is because, during the first few iterations, the calculated figures merge to being close to their final figures.

You can see this with the Page Rank Calculator by checking the Data box and performing some calculations. After the first few iterations, the search results on www2 and www3 may still change, but only slightly.

During the dance, the results from www2 and www3 will sometimes show on the www server, but only briefly. Also, new results on www2 and www3 can disappear for short periods. At the end of the dance, the results on www will match those on www2 and www3.

To help understand when Google is spidering there is the Google Dance Tool. It allows you to check your rankings on all three tools www, www2, and www3 and on all 9 datacenters simultaneously.

The Google Web Directory works in combination of the Google Search Technology and the Netscape Open Directory Project which makes it possible to search the Internet organized by topic. Google displays the pages in order of the rank given to it using the Page Rank Technology. It not only searches the titles and descriptions of the websites, but searches the entire content of sites within a related category, which ultimately delivers a comprehensive search to the users. Google also has a fully functional web directory which categorizes all the searches in order.

In the next post we will talk about submitting your site to the Google search engine.

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art and science of optimizing a web page or a web site so that it ranks high in the search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. This article is the first in a series of short articles that will give you the information you need to make the adjustments to your site to help improve your search rankings and benefit bring an increase in search traffic. SEO is simply the act of adjusting the content on your web pages of your website to make them easy for the search engine spiders to examine the context and index them for the subject they deal with.

A search engine spider is a software robot that search engines use to check millions of web pages very quickly and sort them by relevance. A page is indexed when it is spidered and deemed appropriate content to be placed in the search engines results for people to click on.

SEO is both an art and a science because, although there are rules (the science part), it also requires some more subjective imagination is more of an art than a science. It requires understanding how search engines identify pages that are relevant to a query made by a visitor.

In these articles we will be learning to design a marketing strategy based on the principles used by the search engines. Search engines offer the most cost effective way to acquire “real” and “live” business leads. SEO brings better ROI (return on investment) than other forms such as online advertisements, e-mail marketing and newsletters, affiliate and pay per click advertising, and digital campaigns and promotions.

Each search engine has formula called an algorithm that it uses to evaluate web pages and determine their relevance and value when crawling them for possible inclusion in their search engine. A crawler is another name for a software robot that browses all of these pages for the search engine.

Google has a comprehensive and highly developed technology, a straightforward interface and a wide-ranging array of search tools which enable the users to easily access a variety of information online.

Google is Nr. 1

Google is the top search engine and its users can browse the web and find information in various languages, retrieve maps, stock quotes and read news, search for a long lost friend using the phonebook listings available on Google for all of US cities and basically surf the 3 billion odd web pages. It boasts of having world’s largest archive of Usenet messages, going all the way back to 1981. Its technology can be accessed from any conventional desktop PC as well as from various wireless platforms such as WAP and i-mode phones, handheld devices and other such Internet equipped gadgets.

Page rank determines which sites come up first

Page rank is based on the popularity of the web page. When you do a Google search (or any other search engine for that matter) the algorithm will determine which site is the most popular for the given search phrase (call a keyword or keyword phrase). The web pages will be listed in the order of “popularity.”

The formula used by the search engines varies from engine to engine. In addition they are constantly changing so it is nearly impossible to know what the rules are at any given time. There are some things we can do to increase our popularity.

Content is king

The most important part of SEO is having good content. By this I mean having content that is relevant to the subject of the web page. To do so you must content that talks about the subject that is being searched for. This means that it must include the key phrases that people are searching for. To find out what people are searching for you can use tools like Word Tracker. There is both a free version and a paid version.

Back links are votes for popularity

Google calculates the importance of a page by the number of links back to it. It is not only necessary to have other sites with links back to your site, they must also be relevant sites. Google’s robots assume that if other sites relevant to the subject think your site is worthy of giving their readers a link to it that it must be relevant to the subject at hand.

How does a Google search work?

Google has a three step procedure for handling a search query:

1.When the query is submitted the web server sends the query to the index servers. An index server is exactly what its name suggests. It consists of an index much like the index of a book which displays where is the particular page containing the search term is located in the book.

2.After this, the query proceeds to the document servers. These servers actually retrieve the stored documents. Page descriptions or “snippets” are then generated to suitably describe each search result.
3.These results are then returned to the user in less than a one second! (Normally.)

Google updates their index about once a month by recalculating the Page Ranks of each of the web pages that they have crawled. The period during the update is known as the Google dance which we will look at in my next post.

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Bloggers who are interested in building high traffic to their blog and maintaining a successful blog should pay particular attention to search engine optimization techniques which can help to improve the search engine rankings of their blogs. Search engines all employ some type of ranking algorithm which is used to determine the order in which websites are returned when an Internet user searches for information on a particular topic. However, not all search engines use the same algorithm for this purpose. As a result there is no simple solution to optimizing a blog for high rankings on all search engines. There are a few tips though which can be useful with most search engines. These tips include using relevant keywords, generating back links to your blogs and using image tags in a beneficial way.

The Importance of Keywords

The use of relevant keywords in blog posts is one of the most common and also one of the simplest ways to optimize search engine rankings. However, not all bloggers agree on the best ways to use relevant keywords to optimize search engine rankings. Some bloggers believe keywords must be used often to create high keyword densities while others believe using keywords at lower densities of 1%-3% and paying attention to placement of the keywords is the most worthwhile strategy. Still other bloggers argue that simply using relevant keywords as they come naturally in the flow of the blog posts is sufficient to ensure search engines understand the content of the blog.

Regardless of the keyword strategy a blogger opts to employ all bloggers can benefit from researching relevant keywords. They may have a blog which pertains to a general subject such as gardening but may not be aware of the search terms typically used by Internet users when researching this subject. Fortunately there are many programs available which generate related keywords for a particular time which provides the blogger with other keywords they should consider incorporating into the blog. For the example of a blog pertaining to gardening the blogger may want to use additional keywords such as container gardening or home gardening to attract more interest from search engine users.

Generating Favorable Back Links

Back links are also another common factor used in search engine ranking algorithms. Many search engines consider the number of back links pointing to a website as well as the quality of the websites which provide these back links. This means the search engine rankings of the website which points to your blog could influence the amount of weight the back link contributes to your own rankings. This is because some search engines consider higher ranking websites to be more valuable than other websites which do not rank well and therefore reward websites receiving back links from these high ranking websites quite favorably.

Some search engine algorithms also consider whether or not the back links are reciprocated or not reciprocated. In these cases non reciprocal links are usually considered to be more valuable than reciprocal links. Also, back links which come from link exchanges or link farms are typically not considered to be very influential to search engine rankings.

How Images Can Improve Search Engine Rankings

Bloggers should also be aware that any pictures used on their blog can be used to improve search engine rankings with some search engines. This aspect of search engine optimization is often overlooked because many bloggers believe the pictures are not viewed by search engines. While this is true the search engines do crawl the code of the blog in addition to the content on the blog. This means the search engine will view the information provided in the image tags. Bloggers can take advantage of this by using the image tags to provide relevant keywords which can bolster search engine rankings. However, care should be taken to ensure the keywords used in these tags also accurately describe the image because blog visitors will often see the text included in these tags when they scroll over a picture on the blog.

If you want help in building a site that attracts traffic check out SiteBuildit.

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