Garrett SaundryOften times people think that if they register a domain and put a web site up, they will automatically appear on the first page of any search engine results. This, unfortunately, is not true. There is quite a bit of work that goes into making your domain appear at the top of search engine lists, it is, in some respects, a science. Whether you’re just putting up a new site, or you want to elevate the rankings of your current one, it’s hard to know where to start. Here are some simple ways you can boost your search engine results in a few easy steps.
The search engine that I’ll be using for this example is Google. It is the one that we get asked about, and is the best recognized and most used search engine out there today. If you attempt to get yourself listed on any search engine, Google is usually the one you want to concentrate on, it contains about a billion indexed pages and your search results are presented in a clean manner ranked by relevance. It doesn’t throw pop-up ads at you, and when you search for ‘monkey falling out of a tree’, you get just that – all 224 000 pages (who knew there were so many clumsy monkeys out there).
Google has become much more than a search engine, it’s managed to wiggle its way into our daily lexicon. Ten years ago if somebody was asking you for information and you suggested that they Google it, you probably would have gotten a rather puzzled look. These days people are more apt to hit Google first instead of asking you if you know the average temperature in Iceland in July (which according to Google, is 10-12°C).
Now before we go into Google rankings, there are a few things that you need to keep in mind. Everybody out there is trying to get ranked #1 on Google, not just you. There is plenty of competition, and there are people out there that make careers out of getting top ranks on Google. It’s a full time job, and if you think you can be ranked numero uno on Google (with the exception of very obscure topics, think three legged platypus attends mammal/reptile crossover convention level of obscure) with little or no effort you are unfortunately several left turns away from being only slightly off base.
What you need to do first, is request a visit from the Google robot, or bot for short. The Googlebot crawls the Internet indexing web pages for the search engine.
The Google Robot
You can request a Google robot visit at www.google.com/addurl. The robot will browse your site and index its contents. Please note that this won’t happen overnight, it may take a few weeks for your website to get indexed. Also, make sure to remember to list your site at www.dmoz.org. This is Google’s web directory and, coupled with the Googlebot, an important source of the Google application programming interface, which is a source code interface that an operating system or library provides to support requests for services to be made of it by programs.
Keywords Keywords Keywords
It’s important to select relevant keywords, it is also important to mention them often. There are several services that allow you to enter in a keyword, and it returns results based on what terms containing your keyword other people have searched for recently. Below is an example of the top five results from inventory.overature.com, searching on the term ‘bicycle’. These sort of tools will allow you to plan and structure your keywords according to popularity.
Page Rank
Page rank is basically a score given to your page from one to ten, one being bad and ten being good. The lower ranked your page, the less likely you will be to appear at the top of the search rankings. If you want to do a quick check of your page rank, there are many available tools out there. I did a Google (surprise, surprise) search and found the following which is pretty simple to use, type in your domain name and away you go. http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php
When formatting your web site keep in mind that Googlebot does not recognize frames, so to get ranked you’ll need to make sure your site is properly formatted and written in a standard programming language. Googlebot will also skip over flash action scripting so avoid creating your site using only flash, no matter how cool it looks or how impressed you think your friends will be with the ‘l33tness’ of your skillz….
Also keep in mind that the Googlebot likes pages that are frequently updated and those that are registered for a longer term (ie: a 5 year domain registration as opposed to a 1 year domain registration term)
No BS! (Being Sneaky that is…)
If you think you can be smart and do things like listing a huge long block of keywords in the same colour as your background so that people don’t see it but Googlebot will, don’t bother. The Googlebot will ignore tricks like that. Linkfarms are also highly frowned upon and Google will usually put a 30 day block (search engine) on your site, with the possibility of being removed from the rankings for good. I know that this is probably a lot of information to take in, especially when most people think that getting top ranked at Google simply requires a domain name and a web site. I wish it was that easy, but it’s not. Just keep in mind these tips offered up, do some research on your own (may I suggest an excellent starting point being Google itself) and you should be well on your way to climbing up in the dog eat dog world of Google rankings.