» Seo for Google
By: Paul Bliss
How Google Indexes Your Site
I can't tell you how many times I've answered this question in
forums, so I figured since so many are asking, it would make for
a great article.
First off, let's describe what we are talking about. A "bot" is
a piece of software from a search engine that is built to go
through every page of your site, categorize it, and place it
into a database.
Google has three well known bots: The Adsense bot, the Freshbot
and the DeepCrawl.
The Adsense bot, as you could probably guess, is used for
publishers who have Adsense on their sites. As soon as a new
page is created, the JavaScript within the Adsense code sends a
message to the Adsense bot, and it will come within 15 minutes
to index the page so that it can serve up the most relevant ads.
But, for this conversation we are only concerned about the
DeepCrawl and the Freshbot.
The Freshbot crawls the most popular pages on your website. It
doesn't matter if that is one page or thousands. Sites like
Amazon.com and CNN.com have pages that are crawled every ten
minutes, since Google has learned that those pages have that
amount of frequent changes. A typical site should expect to have
a freshbot visit every 1 to 14 days, depending on how popular
those pages are.
What happens to your site on a Freshbot visit is that it finds
all of the deeper links in your site. It places those links into
a database so that when the DeepCrawl occurs, it has a
reference.
Once a month, the DeepCrawl bot visits your site and goes over
all the links found by the Freshbot. This is the reason why it
can take up to a month for your entire site to be indexed in
Google - even with the addition of a Google Sitemap.
So, be patient and keep on adding content to your site, and work
on getting valuable in-bound links to your site - Google will
reward you for it.
Google TrustRank
There has been an ever increasing awareness to the value of
Google's "TrustRank" algorithm. While there are many factors
that are "Off-page", there are a number of simple actions you
can take to make sure your site earns the trust from Google by
employing these easy techniques.
The best way to think about Trustrank is to compare it to if you
were to purchase a product or service in the real world. There
are many built-in factors that we use to pre-qualify a business
to see if we are willing to part with our cash for their goods
or services. This is the same approach Google takes in order to
measure the quality of a site, and doing this will get you out
of the so-called "Sandbox" much faster than the typical 4-6
months.
While in no particular order, some are most costly than others,
but all are worth doing.
* Register your domain for 10 years. If you can't afford the $70
it costs at GoDaddy then are you really serious about your site?
* Buy a SSL certificate - this tells Google that you are a legit
business since they know you have to have a verified checking
account to get a SSL cert. (And buy it for as many years as you
can at a time, at the very least for 2 years)
* Have a privacy policy that tells in exact detail what happens
to the information about the visitor that is collected from the
site.
* List a mailing address (no P.O. Boxes) - Just as in real life,
you feel better purchasing a service or product from a place
that has a physical location.
* List your contact information - telephone, fax (if needed),
email & name.
* If you have a bigger budget, use any of the "Hacker Safe"
services and place those icons on your site. Again, this tells
Google that you are seriously committed to protecting your
visitor's experience on the site.
Those are simple techniques that you can directly apply to your
site, and are signals to Google that you take your online
presence seriously.
As far as the "Off-page" factors, it's really about linking to
quality sites that are relevant and sometimes considered
"authority sites" by Google. Also, getting links from those
trusted sites will help re-enforce the quality of your site in
the eyes of the Google spiders.
How to Get Your Site a Top Ranking in
Google
It's the new American dream. Your website appears in a top spot
on Google for your chosen keyword. Next thing you know, orders
start coming in faster than you can handle, and you are rolling
in the money. If only it were so easy, right?
Well, It can be done. I've done it many times in many different
industries. There is no secret, but rather, it's just knowing
what to do. I've made just about every mistake one can make with
a website, but I learned from every setback. If you were only
allowed to do one thing to get ranked for your site in Google,
without a doubt, all you'd need to do is get links for your
site.
Yes, there are many other factors involved in getting your site
to a top position. But this is the most powerful way as of this
writing to get a top spot in Google. It's not just enough to
have links pointing to your site, but you need to have your
keyword "anchor linked" to your site. Anchor linking is when you
use your keyword phrase as the click-able text for a link. So,
instead of saying "Click Here", you would use "Widgets" as the
link text.
Now, another point of consideration is determining what
keyword/phrase you want to use to get your site found. Most
times, people impulsively choose a one word phrase. While this
would be a great way to bring traffic to your site, would it
bring targeted traffic, with people looking specifically for
your product or service? Most times when people type in a one
letter keyphrase, they are in the beginning of their search.
They may type in "Shoes", but are really looking for "Running
Shoes". So, if you have a top ranking for shoes, do you serve
that user's needs? Maybe, but they may also be looking for
dress, casual, Women's, Men's, Children's, athletic, girl's,
boy's, etc. This is why when you begin to optimize your site,
you should focus on more targeted keyword phrases.
Suppose you sell a certain brand name of dress shoes. For this
example, we'll call the famous brand XYZ. So, by getting anchor
links as "XYZ Dress Shoes", you are already eliminating those
users who are looking for another brand or line of shoe. Next,
you need to make sure that the page that gets linked contains
the on the page content with "XYZ Dress Shoes". If you would
link to a page without relevant content, Google would view this
link as possible spam, or more appropriately, irrelevant
content.
Now, once you have compiled your list of keywords, you need to
see which one are searched on the most. The best tool for this
is WordTracker, and it is worth the tiny fee you need to pay to
have access for one day. There are also free tools online that
you can use, but WordTracker will give you the most accurate
results.
Once you have run through your list of all your keywords, the
obvious choice is to pick the ones with the highest amount of
searches (and content relevant to your site!). The next step is
to then begin the process of a link campaign. Now, I can already
hear you complaining about doing a link exchange. This is only
1/3 of your campaign. The ideal method is to not only engage in
a reciprocal link exchange, but to also engage in strategic
linking.
Strategic linking is when you get a link to your site without
having to return the favor. What's the best way to do this?
Write an article just like this one. If I get one website to use
this article and have it point to my site, I've just created
another link to my site. Pretty easy, eh?
Since you have now engaged in a linking campaign, you should
expect to see results in Google in as little as 4 days, and as
far as 6 months. All of this is determined by where your links
are coming from, and the popularity of the site from which the
link came. Next, you need to get as many links as you can
pointing to your site with your popular keyword phrase anchor
linked to your site.
As I mentioned before, there many other factors that will only
enhance your rankings in Google, but the implementation of a
link campaign is the strongest method to get your site to a top
ranking!
How to Create a Google Site Map
Officially announced on June 6th, 2005 at Google'e Blog, Google
Site Map allows you to submit a listing of all your urls for
Google to crawl.
There have been many questions concerning the procedure of
creating a Google Site Map. Below is the non-Python way of
creating one. (Note: Google has further documentation at their
site)
First, create a file named sitemap.xml
Use the following code in any HTML editor:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84">
<url>
<loc>http://www.seoforgoogle.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2005-06-30T14:12:14+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.seoforgoogle.com/glossary.cfm</loc>
<lastmod>2005-06-30T14:12:14+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>
</urlset>
Here's a breakdown of those properties:
lastmod -
This is the date the document was last modified and uses the
following formats:
dd.mm.yyyy
dd.mm.yyyy hh:mm
dd/mm/yyyy
dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm
changefreq -
Tells Google Sitemaps the frequently that content of a
particular URL will change.
Your options are "always", "hourly", "daily", "weekly",
"monthly", "yearly" or "never".
The value "always" should be used to describe documents that
change each time they are accessed. The value "never" should be
used to describe archived URLs.
priority -
The priority of a particular URL relative to other pages on your
site.
You may select between 0.0 and 1.0, where 0.0 identifies the
lowest priority page(s) on your website and 1.0 identifies the
highest priority page(s) on your website.
Add as many pages as there are in your website.
Google Sitemap supports up to 50,000 pages per XML file.
Once you've completed all of those steps, you'll need to submit
your site map page.
Submit to: (requires gmail account)
https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login
Author:
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