Google's Importance to Webmasters

But isn't Google just a search engine web site like any other? Actually, its reach is far greater than that. Google partners with other sites to use the Google index results, including the likes of heavyweight properties AOL and Yahoo!. Not to mention the multitude of sites out there making use of the Google API. So when you think about potential visitors from Google's search results, you have to think beyond traditional search site borders.

It's becoming ever more important what Google thinks of your site. That means you're going to be sure that your site abides by the Google rules or risk not being picked up. If you're very concerned about search engine traffic, you're going to have to make sure that your site is optimized for luring in Google's spiders and being indexed in an effective manner. And if you're concerned that Google should not index some parts of your site, you need to understand the ins and outs of configuring your robots.txt file to reflect your preferences.

More About Page Rank

PageRank is one of those mysteries that may never be completely unraveled. Volumes have been written about it, but probably the only two people in the world who understand it completely are Larry Page and Sergey Brin. That’s because it was their brainchild. PageRank as part of a research project that Page and Brin were working on at Stanford University. The project involved creating a new search engine that ranked pages in a democratic fashion with a few weights and measures thrown in for accuracy. Hence, the term. (What else would you call a ranking system for web pages that was developed by Larry Page?) The interesting thing about PageRank is that although Page and Brin conceived the idea and created the algorithm that arrives at a PageRank, it didn’t belong to them. Stanford University actually owned the patent on the PageRank algorithm until Google purchased the exclusive right to use the algorithm for 1.8 million shares of the company (which were sold in 2005 for $336 million). PageRank is a method by which web pages are ranked in Google search results. A combination of factors create the actual rank of a web page. Google explains it this way: ‘‘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.’’’ In other words, it’s a mystery. A page that has more links (with equal votes) might rank lower than a page that has a single link that leads to a ‘‘more important’’ page. The lesson? Create pages for visitors, not for search engines. Still to understand pagerank algorithms is tough science to pin down.

Search Engine - Anatomy

By now you probably have a fuzzy idea of how a search engine works, but there’s much more to it than just the basic overview you’ve seen so far. In fact, search engines have several parts. Unfortunately, it’s rare that you find an explanation describing just how a search engine is made — that’s proprietary information that search companies hold very close to their vests — and that information is vitally important to succeeding with search engine optimization (SEO). Query interface The query interface is what most people are familiar with, and it’s probably what comes to mind when you hear the term ‘‘search engine.’’ The query interface is the page, or user interface, that users see when they navigate to a search engine to enter a search term. There was a time when the search engine interface looked very much like the Ask.com page shown in Figure 1-1. This interface was a simple page with a search box and a button to activate the search, and not much more. Today, many search engines on the Web have added much more personalized content in an attempt to capitalize on the real estate available to them. For example, Yahoo! Search, is just one of the search services that now enable users to personalize their pages with a free e-mail account, weather information, news, sports, and many other elements designed to make users want to return to that site to conduct their web searches. One other option users have for customizing the interfaces of their search engines is a capability like the one Google offers. The Google search engine has a customizable interface to which users can add different gadgets. These gadgets enable users to add features to their customized Google search home page that meet their own personal needs or tastes. Search has even extended onto the desktop. Google and Microsoft both have search capabilities that, when installed on your computer, enable you to search your hard drive for documents and information in the same way you would search the Web. These capabilities aren’t of any particular use to you where SEO is concerned, but they do illustrate the prevalence of search and the value that users place on being able to quickly find information using searching capabilities. When it comes to search engine optimization, Google’s user interface offers the most potential for you to reach your target audience, because it does more than just optimize your site for search: If a useful tool or feature is available on your site, you can enable users to have access to this tool or feature through the Application Programming Interface (API) made available by Google. Using the Google API, you can create a gadget that users can install on their Google Desktop, iGoogle page, or Firefox or Chrome browser. This enables you to have your name in front of users on a daily basis. You can find more information about Google APIs in Appendix A in the section ‘‘Optimization for Google.’’ For example, a company called PDF24.org offers a Google gadget that enables users to turn their documents into PDF files right from their Google home page once the gadget has been added. If the point of search engine optimization is ultimately to get your name in front of as many people as possible, as often as possible, then making a gadget available for addition to Google’s personalized home page can only further that goal. Search engine results pages The other sides of the query interface, and the only other parts of a search engine that’s visible to users, are the search engine results pages (SERPs). This is the collection of pages that are returned with search results after a user enters a search term or phrase and clicks the Search button. This is also where you ultimately want to end up; and the higher you are in the search results, the more traffic you can expect to generate from search. Specifically, your goal is to end up on the first page of results — in the top 10 or 20 results that are returned for a given search term or phrase. Getting there can be a mystery, however. We’ll decode the clues that lead you to that goal throughout the book, but right now you need to understand a bit about how users see SERPs. Let’s start with an understanding of how users view SERPs. Pretend you’re the searcher. You go to your favorite search engine — we’ll use Google for the purposes of illustration because that’s everyone’s favorite, isn’t it? Type in the term you want to search for and click the Search button. What’s the first thing you do when the page appears? Most people begin reading the titles and descriptions of the top results. That’s where you hook searchers and entice them to click through the links provided to your web page. But here’s the catch: You have to be ranked close enough to the top for searchers to see those results page titles and descriptions and then click through them, which usually means you need to be in the top 10 or 20 results, which translates into the first page or two of results. It’s a tough spot to hit. There is no magic bullet or formula that will garner you those rankings every time. Instead, it takes hard work and consistent effort to push your site as high as possible in SERPs. At the risk of sounding repetitive, that’s the information you’ll find moving forward. There’s a lot of it, though, and to truly understand how to land good placement in SERPs, you really need to understand how search engines work. There is much more to them than what users see. Crawlers, spiders, and robots The query interface and search results pages truly are the only parts of a search engine that the user ever sees. Every other part of the search engine is behind the scenes, out of view of the people who use it every day. That doesn’t mean it’s not important, however. In fact, what’s in the back end is the most important part of the search engine, and it’s what determines how you show up in the front end. If you’ve spent any time on the Internet, you may have heard a little about spiders, crawlers, and robots. These little creatures are programs that literally crawl around the Web, cataloging data so that it can be searched. In the most basic sense, all three programs — crawlers, spiders, and robots — are essentially the same. They all collect information about each and every web URL. Databases Every search engine contains or is connected to a system of databases where data about each URL on the Web (collected by crawlers, spiders, or robots) is stored. These databases are massive storage areas that contain multiple data points about each URL. The data might be arranged in any number of different ways and is ranked according to a method of ranking and retrieval that is usually proprietary to the company that owns the search engine. You’ve probably heard of the method of ranking called PageRank (for Google) or even the more generic term quality scoring. This ranking or scoring determination is one of the most complex and secretive parts of SEO. How those scores are derived, exactly, is a closely guarded secret, in part because search engine companies change the weight of the elements used to arrive at the score according to usage patterns on the Web. The idea is to score pages based on the quality that site visitors derive from the page, not on how well web site designers can manipulate the elements that make up the quality score. For example, there was a time when the keywords that were used to rank a page were one of the most important factors in obtaining a high-quality score.

Getting Acquainted with Search Engines.. Contd..Part-2

Okay, so you know the basic concept of a search engine. Type a word or phrase into a search box and click a button. Wait a few seconds, and references to thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of pages will appear. Then all you have to do is click through those results to find what you want. But what exactly is a search engine, beyond this general concept of ‘‘seek and ye shall find’’? It’s a little complicated. On the back end, a search engine is a piece of software that uses algorithms to find and collect information about web pages. The information collected is usually keywords or phrases that are possible indicators of what is contained on the web page as a whole, the URL of the page, the code that makes up the page, and links into and out of the page. That information is then indexed and stored in a database. On the front end, the software has a user interface where users enter a search term — a word or phrase — in an attempt to find specific information. When the user clicks a search button, an algorithm then examines the information stored in the back-end database and retrieves links to web pages that appear to match the search term the user entered. The process of collecting information about web pages is performed by an agent called a crawler, spider, or robot. The crawler literally looks at every URL on the Web that’s not blocked from it and collects key words and phrases on each page, which are then included in the database that powers a search engine. Considering that the number of sites on the Web exceeded 100 million some time ago and is increasing by more than 1.5 million sites each month, that’s like your brain cataloging every single word you read, so that when you need to know something, you think of that word and every reference to it comes to mind. In a word . . . overwhelming.

Getting Acquainted with Search Engines..

Tell me what you do when you need to find a small bit of information, that may be a description , a product, or anything you are looking for . Exactly you go to your favorite search engine, enter the keyword ( anything you are looking for), And there you go. Millions of results will pop up at screen with just a single click, like a magic. But this was not possible in earlier 80's when search engines were not there . All Of you must be thinking at this point . that " if there were no search engine's existence at that time, then how we used to search information ? And if i say that there were no interconnected sites or internet at that time too , then.? World wide web was invented by Sir Tim Berners Lee - then set up 1st website in 1991, made available to all in 1993. Needless to say his creation was gigantic . Dr. Vinton G. Cerf was the father of internet who has also worked with the biggest search engine today (Google) . He shared his title with Robert Kahn. At that time what was called the internet was actually a collection of FTP Files ( File Transfer Protocol) . Sites that are used for uploading and downloading of files. To find the exact information user has to go through every file very precisely. Although there were shortcuts but if you know exact user with exact file address only then you can take deep breath. This whole process will test your patience in searching for files . But Student at Mcgill University at Montreal was engaged in building a better way of searching files. It was Allan Emtage who created the first search tool used on internet in 1990. The task was to index the files on internet by the tool called Archie. Archie wasn’t actually a search engine like those that you use today, but at the time it was a program many Internet users were happy to have. Again in 1991 Mark McCahill, a student from University of Minnesota, realized that if you could search for files on the Internet, then surely you could also search plain text for specific references in the files. Because no such application existed, he created Gopher, a program that indexed the plain-text documents that later became the first web sites on the public Internet. later Archie was combine with Gopher which used to search the files indexed by Gopher. Both the index was proved to be a boon for user blessing users with indexing and searching by keyword . These invention changed the image of search engines . the first search engine was developed by Mathew Gray ., and it was known as wandex. the first program to search and index pages . This technology was first program to crawl web and later this technology becomes the base of many search engines today. From 1993 to 1998 major familiar search engines of today were created ■ Excite—1993 ■ Yahoo!—1994 ■ Web Crawler —1994 ■ Lycos —1994 ■ Infoseek— 1995 ■ AltaVista — 1995 ■ Inktomi—1996 ■ Ask Jeeves — 1997 ■ Google —1997 ■ MSN Search—1998

SEO - A tough Science to pin down

Before starting a long Journey I would like you to know few things about Search engine optimization. Seo involves hard work and is dynamic in nature. Just recollect this before taking Seo as a career . Don't think that seo is never going to change. Seo rely on search engines and search engines rely on algorithms ( Algorithms - Its types of dynamic mysterious Mathematical calculations based on which search engines rank there web pages ... Just as our academic marks decides our rank in class) . Search ranking algorithms keeps on changing . If you are lucky, then these changes will mildly effect your website ranking . Always construct your site while keeping targeted users in mind . Don't build it to please search engines. Because its more likely that your search ranking will turned on their head. That's why its vitally important to build users oriented websites and then for search engines . Its realistic to understand that you will end up putting dozen of hours into your seperate seo efforts. Like Site Design, Its Conten, its Developing part etc. This seems to be little confused explanation to many of the novice out there .. but don't worry the picture will be more visible as the wonderful journey of seo progresses. SO R U READY FOR EXPEDITION.?