"That's funny," Stef said, "I would have thought that word of mouth was the most important thing."
"No," Anita said, contradicting her sister, "I think making a site findable is more important. I have bookmarks for the sites I often visit, but there aren't that many of those. Most of the time, I just start the browser and Google for what I want."
"Ah yes," I said, "the newest verb in the English language: 'to Google.' I'm sure Google's lawyers have daily fits over that use of their trademark. But it underscores what Anita just said: People turn to search engines to find the information they want. If your site's not listed in the search engines, or it has a poor ranking, you'll miss out on a lot of traffic."
"Is it easy to get listed?" Claude asked.
"For the most part, yes," I said, "though it may take a while. The harder part is getting a good listing."
"You mean a high ranking?" he said.
"Yes," I explained, "the nearer you are to the top of a search-results page, the more traffic you'll get. A lot of Web site owners spend a lot of time trying to get their sites to rank higher in the listings. And to get their pages associated with the right keywords. They call the whole process search engine optimization, or SEO for short."
"Sounds scary," Anita said.
"Ah, it's just geek talk for getting better page rankings," I said. "The basics are pretty simple, and you've already done some of them: You've chosen good domain names; you've written good page titles and descriptions; you've put up relevant and keyword-rich content. Now it's a matter of spending time to get your sites in the search engines and then to bump up their rankings. Let's see how that's done." And I explained to them what search engine optimization is all about.
Getting Listed
The first step is to get listed in your favorite search engines. There are three ways to do this:
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Submit your Web address directly to the search engine for free.
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Get someone already listed to link to your site.
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Pay to have your site listed on one or more search engines.
Which you do depends entirely on the search engine you're targeting. Obviously, the free option appeals to most people. To submit a site to Google, fill out the simple form at www.google.com/addurl (Figure 9.1). To submit a site to Yahoo!, go to submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request (Figure 9.2)you'll need to register for a Yahoo! account if you don't already have one. To submit to MSN Search, use the form at search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx (Figure 9.3). Submitting your site to the major search engines only takes a few minutes and is well worth the effort.
Downsides of Free Site Submission
Don't expect your site to show up immediately in the search engine's listings. It may take weeks before the search engine crawls (that is, inventories the pages of) your site. Or it may refuse your site for various reasons.
Not all search engines let you submit sites for free. Some require either a one-time payment or a subscription in order to list your site. There may be different payment levels available, with the pricier levels guaranteeing more prominent placement of your site in the search engine's results. Some sites, like Yahoo! and MSN, offer both free and paid submission options.
| Google does not offer the option to pay to have your site listed in its index. All site submissions are free of charge. Site owners cannot pay to increase their page rankings: Google has always said that sponsored results (AdWords) do not affect how they rank pages relative to one another. |
Is it worth paying for getting listed? Not initially. Submit your site to the search engines using their free submission forms as soon as you have a few good pages of content available, and spend your time (and money) working on other aspects of the site. Wait until the site's been running for a while and you've explored other avenues for increasing traffic.
The other way to be listed by a search engine is to get an already indexed site to link to yours. Search engines periodically recrawl the sites in their indexes, looking for new content and new links. If one of these sites links to a page on your site, the crawler will eventually find its way to that page. And if you've followed the linking rules laid out in Chapter 5, the search engine will then be able to find your site's home page and site map, and soon all your pages will find their way into the index.
The trick, of course, is to get a link to your site on someone else's site. If you know someone who already has an indexed site up and running, you can simply ask that person to link to your site. Getting your site mentioned in someone's blog is an easy way to do it if your site has useful information that the blogger thinks would be of interest to his or her readers. Note that the quality of the links to your site is also importantmore on this shortly.
Getting listed in a Web directorylike the original Yahoo! directory (Figure 9.4) or the Google directory (Figure 9.5)is another way to get into search engine indexes. (A directory is something like a phone book for Web sites.) For submissions to the Yahoo! directory, see the links near the bottom of the http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html page. The Google directory is actually based on the directory maintained by the Open Directory Project, also known as DMOZ or ODP, a Web-community effort. Getting listed is free, but it's a more involved (and sometimes controversial) processsee http://dmoz.org/add.html for more details.
Free Listing for Your Site
Purchasers of this book can apply to get their site listed for free on the www.memwg.com Web site if the site was built with the help of this book. See the full list of conditions at www.memwg.com/free-listing.
Determining Your Ranking
Each search engine arranges its search results in some manner. Complicated algorithms are used to determine which Web pages best match a given set of search terms. Search engine staff spend a lot of time tuning the algorithms in order to return the most relevant results possible to all kinds of queries. Even though the search service itself is free, it's all about making money: The better the results, the more the search engine is used; the more the search engine is used, the more money the search engine company makes by selling related services.
You don't just want your site to be listed by a search engine; you want your pages to rank high in the search results. Being ranked in the top ten sites for a given keyword is a surefire way to generate traffic for your site, especially if you can nab the first or second spot on the list. Of course, every other site owner wants the same thing, so you'll face stiff competition to get one of those prized rankings.
| The PageRank formula was created by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University. The relative importance of a particular page is calculated according to the number of other pages that link to it and how important those other pages are themselves. A basic description of the formula is found on the Google Web site at www.google.com/technology, but see the list at www.memwg.com/pagerank for more details about the formula. |
How search engines rank individual pages is a matter of great debate among Web site owners. For competitive reasons, search engines rarely disclose more than vague details about their page-ranking algorithms. Even the famous PageRank formulathe one that determines a site's popularity by counting the number of other sites that link to itis just a small (though important) part of Google's ranking algorithm.
PageRank Tools
Firefox and Mozilla users can download an open-source browser extension that displays the current page's PageRank in the browser's status bar. See www.memwg.com/ pagerank for details.
Competition isn't the only reason search engines keep their algorithms proprietary. Once key algorithms like the PageRank formula are generally known, site owners start to adapt their pages specifically for the algorithms in order to favorably skew the search engine results their way. For example, link farmsgroups of Web sites created specifically to increase the number of links to targeted pageswere used early on to bump up Google page rankings. Search engines are constantly monitoring and adjusting their search algorithms in order to avoid this kind of overt manipulation.
The simplest way to determine a page's ranking is to search using page-related keywords and see where the page ends up in the search results. Since your site is keyword-driven itself (to display more relevant ads), this should yield fairly accurate results.
Another way to determine page ranking is to use Google's Toolbar (Figure 9.6). The Toolbar, currently available only for Internet Explorer, can display a page's relative PageRank on a scale from 0 to 10, with 10 being the most important and 0 the least. The higher the PageRank, the higher your page's ranking within a search.
Improving Your Ranking
As long as you're not doing it deceptively or fraudulently, there's nothing wrong with trying to improve your site's search engine rankings. This is what search engine optimization (SEO) is all about.
Do You Crawl Here Often?
Improving your site's search engine rankings is a slow process because it depends on how often search engines crawl your site, and that may happen as seldom as every few weeksthere's no set schedule.
There are two basic techniques for improving a page's ranking. The first is to ensure that the page has good content and good keyword density. This should be a no-braineryou should already be creating your pages this way if you want AdSense to display relevant ads. Watch for missing keywords, thoughtry to figure out what people are really searching for and make sure your page gets included in the search results.
The other technique is to get highly ranked pages to link to your page. This increases the relative importance of your own page, especially if the anchor text of the link (the text that the user clicks to activate the link) contains keywords relevant to your site. While this technique works especially well with Google, where the popularity of a page is a fundamental part of the PageRank formula, all search engines use incoming links as an important ranking tool. Note that the reverse can also be true: Incoming links from poorly ranked pagesespecially those that have been removed from search engine indexes due to overt attempts at page-rank manipulationwill drag down the page's ranking.
As you might imagine, obtaining high-quality incoming links to your site can be a challenge. You can try to initiate a link swap with the other site, whereby you both agree to link to each other's sitesthe classic "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" situation. But link swaps only work if both parties feel they have something to gain from the relationship.
Of course, if you have unique, useful content, other sites will start linking to yours without any prompting on your part. This can be a mixed blessing, however, because you have no control over the quality of those incoming links.
