I get a lot of questions about search engines from my clients and students. One of my earlier articles dealt generally with this topic, but now I'd like to focus in on a specific search engine: Google. The reason? Google is rapidly becoming the most popular search engine on the Web, and for good reason: it has a reputation for returning fast and accurate results with a high degree of integrity. In fact Google is so confident in its accuracy that it offers an "I Feel Lucky" button that automatically sends you to the top ranking result, bypassing the search results page entirely.
When I talk about integrity, I'm referring to the ranking of search results. When you submit a search, you want the best results that match your query. For example, if you submit "wooden rocking chair," you expect to see vendors who sell wooden rocking chairs along with other information related to them, like articles and product reviews. But what qualifies a site as being the "best" site? I doubt your answer is "the guy who paid the most to be ranked the highest." Well, if you are like me, you tend to ask other people for recommendations when you are looking to buy something, and there's no reason why your search engine shouldn't work the same way.
That is where Google's proprietary page ranking system comes in. In a nutshell, Google's page ranking system is pretty darn simple: The site with the most links to it wins. It's essentially a popularity contest. Google counts every link to your site as a vote in its favor. Additionally, a vote from a popular site is worth more than a vote from a less popular site.
Google runs the popularity contest (i.e. recalculates site rankings) about once a month, which is how long it takes for its Googlebots to crawl the web and follow the approximately 1 billion links they typically process. New links are added, obsolete links are removed, and rankings are recalculated. To prevent tampering, Google's ranking system is smart enough to watch for obvious ploys at faking popularity, like creating pages full of nothing but links to pump up the number of votes for those links.
So how do you get listed with a high ranking? You basically have to deserve it. It isn't even necessary to submit your page to Google, because it will find your site if other sites link to it. You can submit your site, but that really doesn't do you much good if no one else links to you.
In the end, we are back to the basics of marketing. Your job is to let as many people know you exist as possible. More importantly, you need to convince other sites that they should add a link to your site. The best way to do this is to perform some searches on the keywords you expect your customers to use. The sites that come back at the top of the list are ranked the highest, so those are the guys you start with. It may be a tough sell getting a direct competitor to link to you, but you should be able to find other sites that would see the benefit of making your link available to their visitors. Be prepared to pay for a link or advertisement.
A note about keywords: Google evaluates the entire page content, so adding keywords with meta tags and alt tags doesn't do you any good. Other search engines may still use these artifacts, so having them doesn't hurt anything, just don't lose sleep over setting them up.
With major sites like Yahoo turning to Google to power their searches, Google is only going to increase in popularity. Until someone else comes along with a page ranking system that can compete with it anyway.
Here are some links you might find useful relating to Google and other search engines:
- Bibliography -
Check out Google:
http://www.google.com
Submit your site to Netscape's DMOZ directory:
http://dmoz.org/add.html
Submit your site to Yahoo:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/
Learn about search engines:
http://www.webseed.com |
