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GETTING LISTED ON GOOGLE

Google searches more sites more quickly, delivering the most relevant results. [source: www.google.com/technology/index.html] Introduction Google runs on a unique combination of advanced hardware and software. The speed you experience can be attributed in part to the efficiency of our search algorithm and partly to the thousands of low cost PC's we've networked together to create a superfast search engine. The heart of our software is PageRank™, a system for ranking web pages developed by our founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University. And while we have dozens of engineers working to improve every aspect of Google on a daily basis, PageRank continues to provide the basis for all of our web search tools. PageRank Explained PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important." Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query. Integrity Google's complex, automated methods make human tampering with our results extremely difficult. And though we do run relevant ads above and next to our results, Google does not sell placement within the results themselves (i.e., no one can buy a higher PageRank). A Google search is an easy, honest and objective way to find high-quality websites with information relevant to your search. At Taylor Applications, LLC. we follow Google's suggested 'Design and Content Guidelines' to help promote your website. Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link. Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages. Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content. Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it. Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images. Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate. Check for broken links and correct HTML. If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few. Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100). Three Ways To Get Listed In Google [source: www.mikes-marketing-tools.com] In this article I show you three ways to get listed in Google, including one method that is virtually guaranteed to work. I'm constantly surprised by what I find when dealing with search engine optimization clients. One of those "surprises" is coming across sites that aren't listed by Google, even though they have been live for many months. For most Web sites, Google refers more traffic than any other search engine. So it's imperative that your site is indexed in Google. As of September 09, 2003, Google claims to index Searching 3,307,998,701 web pages. Yet somehow sites still fail to make it into the Google index! There are three simple methods to getting listed in Google, but only one of these is guaranteed... well almost. ;o) 1. Submit Direct To Google The first method is to submit your web site via Google's free submit your site form. Just submit your home page and Google's crawler, Googlebot, will crawl the rest. However, Google does not add all submitted URLs to their index, and there is no guarantee as to when, or if, your site will be indexed. 2. Get Linked From A Site That Google Crawls The second method is to get a site that Google already crawls to link to your site. So when Google recrawls the web site, it will find the link to your site and crawl and index it as well. This is Google's preferred method of finding sites to index. To get another site to link to yours, simply look for a site that links to your competitors and ask them to link to yours. You may have to offer a link back to their site in exchange. You may like to read my link popularity article, "How To Quickly Improve Your Link Popularity." In this article I show you how to find link exchange partners. 3. Submit Your Site To The Yahoo! Directory & The Open Directory Project Index The third method is to submit your web site to the Yahoo! Directory [http://dir.yahoo.com] and/or Open Directory Project index [http://www.dmoz.org], which is owned by Netscape. As far as I know, this is the only guaranteed method of getting into the Google index. Google has agreements with Yahoo! and Netscape to include the sites indexed in their directories in the Google index. So submit your site to either, or both (recommended), of these directories. For more information, visit Yahoo!'s How to Suggest Your Site page and the Open Directory Project's How to add a site to the Open Directory page. Once your site is included in either of these directories, it will appear in the Google index in about 4 to 8 weeks.