How search engines work
The first thing to realize about search engines is that they only know about websites that are submitted to them directly or that they have found when searching the web.
This means that when you search the web using a particular search engine that, the results that are displayed, only relate to websites that the search engine knows about. It stands to reason if the search engine does not know about your website you will not be listed within the search results by that search engine.
Robots, spiders and crawlers
A search engine such as Google has automated software referred to as robots, spiders or crawlers, which will search the Web looking for new websites, or new pages within websites.
The search engines will also search for pages that have been updated and modified since the last time they were crawled by the search engines.
For this reason it is a good idea to update your website with new content every so often, because this is exactly what the search engines are looking for.
Organic vs. paid search results
When Google displays the search results, you will normally see what are called ‘paid for’ results displayed at the top of the page and sometimes down the side of the page. The ‘paid for’ results section is normally lightly shaded and is frequently labeled as ‘sponsored’ links or advertisements.
If you want your company to be displayed within the ‘paid for’ results section, then you need to register with Google, and take part in a global auction. This global auction will determine which company is displayed at the top of the paid for results, and which companies are displayed further down the list. The more you bid, the more likely that you will be displayed at the top of the paid for results section.
Google keeps changing – Penguin and Panda
One of the problems with optimizing a website to maximize your website visibility within the search engine results is that Google keeps changing how it ranks websites.
Every so often Google introduces a big change. In fact if you search Google using the terms Google Penguin and Google Panda you will find that these are code names that were used for major upgrades to the way that Google works and these were implement some time ago.
Again if you do some research, you will find there are a lot of unhappy website owners out there, who suffered badly when Google Penguin and Google Panda were released. The reason for this is that these particular modifications to the way Google works were aimed at low quality websites many of which did not adhere to the basic standards for website promotion specified by Google.
The basic point here is there are no shortcuts when it comes to search engine optimization. If you want to be well-positioned in the Google search engine results then you have to play by Google’s rules. It’s no use trying to shortcut the rules and then moaning when Google penalizes your website. There are a lot of SEO companies out there who will use what is termed black hat SEO which basically either breaks the rules or skirts very close to the edge.
Over optimization hurts
These days most people have heard about search engine optimization. Many people are trying to do the SEO themselves and sometimes this does work however SEO is a specialist topic. Either get a specialist to do the work for you, or take the time to learn how to do it yourself, so you know what you’re doing not just hoping for the best.
Whichever route you take there is always the danger of over optimizing your website. Google is getting smarter by the day and will look at how your website is put together and it will look at the code behind the scenes. Google expects you and in fact encourages you to perform a sensible amount of search engine optimization, however if you overdo it Google will actually penalizes the website. Where that line is, is something of a moving target but basically you can use common sense and this will normally keep you in good stead with Google.
An example of overdoing it might be to have exactly the same keyword used as your title and description on every single page, and then repeating this word over and over again within the text displayed within your website.
As a test you should always get someone to read over your website and just ask them if your paragraphs sound natural.
What is a web server?
A Web server is simply a computer connected directly to the Internet which is always on and which houses your website.
When you write a website you will normally create this on the hard disk of your computer and once you’re ready to publish the website or to update new pages within your website, you will upload the new pages to your particular Web Server.
How this all works technically is not important. If you are writing and maintaining a website all you need to know is how to upload to your particular Web Server.
In some cases the programs used to write websites have a built-in capacity to upload to your particular Web Server. In other cases you may use specialist software called FTP software to copy the web content on your hard disk up to your Web server.
As I said, you do not need to worry unnecessarily about how to configure a Web server because in most cases this will be done for you, all you have to worry about is uploading to the server.
Index. htm – The Home Page
Every website has a homepage, which is the starting page for the website. This is the page that you wish visitors to see when they first load up your website. This is the page that will be displayed when you type in the base URL of a website. For instance, if you were to view www.ibm.com, you would see the homepage of the IBM website.
In most cases the homepage has a special name, such as index.htm or index.html. There are many other similar naming conventions that can be used and this will vary depending on exactly how your Web server is configured.
In many ways the homepage is the single most important page within your entire website. This is also the first page that most search engines will examine when exploring your website and determining how to list your website within the search engine results.
Page Rank
The Google search engine gives each website page a Page Rank number. This Page Rank number is essentially an indication that Google assigns to the value of a particular web page. The Page Rank numbering system ranges from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top, and it is important to realize that this is a non-linear scale.
You will find that many website pages have a Page Rank of zero which could indicate either that Google has yet to discovery and rank this page or it could indicate that the particular page has been penalized by Google for attempting to Spam the search engines, and has been de-listed by the search engine.
It is important to realize that Page Rank is just one of the many factors that will affect the position of the page within the search engine listings. All things being equal, the higher the Page Rank the higher a particular page will be listed in the search engine results, compared to other pages of lower Page Rank.
In order to view the Page Rank of a particular page you should install the Google tool bar, and then if necessary activate the Page Rank tool. The Page Rank tool will display a short horizontal bar and moving the mouse over the bar will display the actual Page Rank for that particular page.
You should endeavour to achieve the highest possible Page Rank for your homepage and other important pages within your website.
The Page Rank that is publicly displayed within the Google toolbar is only updated periodically, typically every few months. This means that if you are engaged in intensive SEO work on a website you cannot expect to see the Page Rank move up overnight.
Sometimes you may find a web page with a low Page Rank displayed towards the top of the search engine results. This may mean that competing pages simply have an even lower Page Rank. It can also mean that other factors are affecting the listing of the page within the search engine results, apart from simply the Page Rank itself.
