When you find a new search system, look carefully on the page near the search box, or on the search results page, and you may find where the search results are coming from. For instance, if you use Alexa ( www.Alexa.com ), one of Amazon.com’s search engines, you see the words POWERED BY GOOGLE next to the Search button; use Amazon.com’s other search system, A9 ( www.A9.com ), and at the bottom of the search results you see this:
Search results enhanced by Google. Results also provided
by a9.com and Alexa.
The same search run at all three systems — Alexa, A9, and Google — produces very similar results. (Although a site may get its search-results feed from another one place, it may manipulate the results so they’re listed in a slightly different order.)
You’ll also want to work with some other search systems, as you find out in articles 12 and 13. In some cases, you need to check out specialty directo- ries and indexes related to the industry in which your Web site operates. But the preceding systems are the important ones for every Web site.
Google alone provides well over 50 percent of all search results (down from 75 percent just a year or two ago). Get into all the systems on the preceding list, and you’re in front of probably more than 95 percent of all searchers. Well, perhaps you’re in front of them. You have a chance of being in front of them, anyway, if your site ranks highly (which is what this book is all about).
Search Engine Magic
Go to Google and search for the term personal injury lawyer. Then look the blue bar below the Google logo, and you see something like this:
Results 1 - 10 of about 16,300,000 for personal injury
lawyer
This means Google has found over 16M pages that contain these three words. Yet somehow it has managed to rank the pages. It’s decided that one particular page should appear first, then another, then another, and so on, all the way down to page 16,300,000. (By the way, this has to be one of the wonders of the modern world: The search engines have tens of thousands of computers, evaluating 10 or 20 billion pages, and returning the information in a fraction of a second.)
How do they do it?
How on earth does Google do it? How does it evaluate and compare pages? How do other search engines do the same? Well, I don’t know exactly . The search engines don’t want you to know how they work (or it would be too easy to create pages that exactly match the search system, “giving them what they want to see”). But I can explain the general concept.
When Google searches for your search term, it begins by looking for pages containing the exact phrase. Then it starts looking for pages containing the words close together. Then it looks for pages that have the pages scattered around. This isn’t necessarily the order in which a search engine shows you pages; in some cases, pages with words close together (but not the exact phrase) appear higher than pages with the exact phrase, for instance. That’s because search engines evaluate pages according to a variety of criteria.
The search engines look at many factors. They look for the words throughout the page, both in the visible page and in the HTML source code for the page. Each time they find the words, they are weighted in some way. A word in one position is “worth” more than a word in another position. A word formatted in one way is “worth” more than a word formatted in another.
There’s more, though. The search engines also look at links pointing to pages, and uses those links to evaluate the referenced pages: How many links are there? How many are from popular sites? What words are in the link text?
Stepping into the programmers’ shoes
There’s a lot of conflicting information out there about SEO. Some of it’s good, some of it’s not so good, and some of it’s downright wrong. When evaluating a claim about what the search engines do, I sometimes find it useful to step into the shoes of the people building the search engines; I try to think, “what would make sense” from the perspective of the programmers who write the code that evaluates all these pages.
Consider this: Say you search for personal injury lawyer , and the search engine finds one page with the term in the pages title” (between the <title> and </title> tags), and another page with the term somewhere deep in the page text. Which do you think is likely to match the search term better? If the text is in the title, doesn’t that indicate that page is likely to be, in some way, related to the term? If the text is deep in the body of the page, couldn’t it mean that the page isn’t directly related to the term, that it is related to it in some incidental or peripheral manner?
Considering SEO from this point of view makes it easier to understand how the search engines try to evaluate and compare pages. If the keywords are in the links pointing to the page, the page must be relevant to those keywords; if the keywords are in headings on the page, that must be significant; if the key- words appear frequently throughout the page, rather than just once, that must mean something. All of sudden, it all makes sense.
I discuss things that the search engines don’t like. You may hear elsewhere all sorts of warnings that may or may not be correct. Here’s an example: I’ve read that using a refresh meta tag to automatically push a visitor from one page to another will get your site penalized, and may even get your site banned from the search engine. You’ve seen this situation: You land on a page on a Web site, and there’s a message saying something like “We’ll forward you to page x in five seconds, or you can click here.” The theory is that search engines don’t like this, and they may punish you for doing this.
Now, does this make any sense? Aren’t there good reasons to sometimes use such forwarding techniques? Yes, there are. So why would a search engine punish you for doing it? They don’t. They probably won’t index the page that is forwarding a visitor — based on the quite reasonable theory that if the site doesn’t want the visitor to read the page, they don’t need to index it — but you’re not going to get punished for using it.
Remember that the search-engine programmers are not interested in punish- ing anyone, they’re just trying to make the best choices between billions of pages. In general, search engines use their “algorithms” to determine how to rank a page, and try to adjust the algorithms to make sure “tricks” are ignored. But they don’t want to punish anyone for doing something for which there might be a good reason, even if the technique could also be used as a trick.
I like to use this as my “plausibility filter” when I hear someone make some unusual or even outlandish claim about how the search engines function. What would the programmers do? , I ask myself.
Gathering Your Tools
You need several tools and skills to optimize and rank your Web site. I talk about a number of these in the appropriate articles, but I want to cover a few basics before I move on. It goes without saying that you need
Basic Internet knowledge.
A computer connected to the Internet. A Web site.
One of these two things:
• Good working knowledge of HTML.
• Access to a geek with a good working knowledge of HTML. Which path should you take? If you don’t know what HTML means (HyperText Markup Language), you probably need to run out and find that geek. HTML is the code used to create Web pages, and you need to understand how to use it to optimize pages. Discussing HTML and how to upload pages to a Web site is beyond the scope of this book. If you’re interested in finding out more, check out HTML For Dummies, 4th Edition, by Ed Tittel and Natanya Pitts, and Creating Web Pages For Dummies, 6th Edition, by Bud Smith and Arthur Bebak (both published by Wiley).
Toolbars. Install the Google toolbar in your Web browser . . . and per- haps the Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.com toolbars, too. And, maybe, the Alexa toolbar. (Before you complain about spyware, I explain in a few moments.) You may want to use these tools even if you plan to use a geek to work on your site. They’re simple to install and open up a com- pletely new view of the Web. The next two sections spell out the details.
Search toolbars
I definitely recommend the Google toolbar, which allows you to begin search- ing Google without going to the Web site first. In addition, you might want to use the Yahoo! and MSN toolbars, which do the same. (You might also try the Ask.com toolbar, but remember that Ask is far less important than Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.) In addition, these toolbars have plenty of extras: auto form fillers, tabbed browsing, desktop search, spyware blockers, translators, spell checkers, and so on. I’m not going to describe all these tools, as they aren’t directly related to SEO, but they’re definitely useful.
You really don’t need all of them, but hey, here they are if you really want to experiment. You can find these toolbars here:
toolbar.google.com
toolbar.yahoo.com
toolbar.msn.com
toolbar.ask.com
Geek or no geek
Many readers of this blog’s first edition are business people who don’t plan to do the search-engine work themselves (or, in some cases, realize that it’s a lot of work and need to find someone with more time or technical skills to do the work).
However, having read the blog,and are in a better position to find and direct someone. As one reader-cum-client, told me, “There’s a lot of snake oil in this business,” so his reading helped him understand the basics and ask the right questions of search-engine optimization firms.they understand far more about search engines.Unfortunately, all these toolbars require Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer; that’s most of you but, I realize, not all. You can see these toolbars, along with the Alexa toolbar, in Figure 1-4. Don’t worry, you don’t have to have all this clutter on your screen all the time. Right-click a blank space on any toolbar, and you can add and remove toolbars temporarily; simply open a toolbar when you need it. I leave the Google toolbar on all the time, and open the others now and then.One thing I do find frustrating about these systems is the pop-up blockers. Yes, they can be helpful, but often they block pop-up windows that I want to see; if you find that you click a link and it doesn’t open, try Ctrl+clicking (which may temporarily disable the pop-up blocker), or disable the blocker on the toolbar.I refer to the Google toolbar here and there throughout this blog because it provides you with the following useful features:A way to search Google without going to www.google.com firstA quick view of the Google PageRank, an important metric that I explain in blog 14
A quick way to see if a Web page is already indexed by Google A quick way to see some of the pages linking to a Web pageThe toolbar has a number of other useful features, but the preceding features are the most useful for the purposes of this blog. Turn on the Info button after installing the toolbar:
1. Click the Options button.
2. Click the More tab in the Toolbar Options dialog box. 3. Enable the Page Info checkbox and click OK.
Alexa toolbar
Alexa is a company owned by Amazon.com, and a partner with Google and Microsoft. It’s been around a long time, and millions
of people around the world use it. Every time someone uses the toolbar to visit a Web site, the toolbar sends the URL to
Alexa, allowing the system to create an enormous database of site visits. The toolbar can provide traffic information to you;
you can quickly see how popular a site is and even view a detailed traffic analysis, such as an estimate of the percentage of
Internet users who visit the site each month.
Work with the Alexa toolbar for a while, and you’ll quickly get a feel for site popularity. A site ranks 453? That’s pretty
good. 1,987,123? That’s a sign that hardly anyone visits the site. In addition, it provides a quick way to find infor- mation
about who owns the site on which the current page sits, and how many pages link to the current page. You can find the Alexa
toolbar, shown in Figure 1-4, at download.alexa.com .
I’ve been criticized for recommending the Alexa toolbar in the first edition of this blog: Many people claim it is spyware.
Some anti-spyware programs search for the toolbar and flag it as spyware, though others don’t. As I men- tioned, the toolbar
sends the URLs you’re visiting. However, Alexa states on the site (and I believe them) that “The Alexa Toolbar contains no
advertising and does not profile or target you.” I know for sure that it doesn’t display ads. Alexa doesn’t steal your
usernames and passwords, as is occasionally claimed. Alexa does gather information about where you visit, but it doesn’t know
who you are, so does it matter? Decide for yourself.
Your One-Hour Search-Engine- Friendly Web Site Makeover
In This blog
Finding your site in the search engines Choosing keywords
Examining your pages for problems
Getting search engines to read and index your pages
few small changes can make a big difference in your site’s position in the search engines. So rather than force you to read
this entire blog before you can get anything done, this blog helps you identify problems with your site and, with a little
luck, shows you how to make a significant dif- ference through quick fixes.
It’s possible that you may not make significant progress in a single hour, as the blog title promises. You may identify
serious problems with your site that can’t be fixed quickly. Sorry, that’s life! The purpose of this blog is to help you
identify a few obvious problems and, perhaps, make some quick fixes with the goal of really getting something done.
Is Your Site Indexed?
It’s important to find out if your site is actually in a search engine or direc- tory. Your site doesn’t come up when someone
searches at Google for rodent racing? Can’t find it in the Yahoo! Directory? Have you ever thought that per- haps it simply
isn’t there? In the next several sections, I explain how to find out if your site is indexed in a few different systems.
Some of the systems into which you want to place your Web site aren’t household names. If I mention a search system that you
don’t recognize, page back to blog 1 to find out more about it.
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