The Google search engine (URL: http://www.google.com/)
launched in September 1999 is now the largest and most popular search engine by
far on the internet. This is largely due to the top quality of Google's Page
Rank Technology which is based on link analysis (link popularity and
link quality) and content analysis (relevance+freshness of content and
location+frequency of keywords). Google crawls the web and maintains a huge
index of cached pages (the largest among the search engines), that is updated
often (approximately every 2 days) to show the freshness of its results.
Google is our top search engine but we also
use other key players like Yahoo!, MSN, Ask Jeeves, Altavista and Teoma, as
each search engine adds its own spice. You can rely on Google to give you the best
resultant links with the content that you are looking for. This is due to
Googlers who aggressively stick to their Quality value - There is no
paid inclusion into the main results which is absolutely free and depends
on the quality of your site - and to the Freshness of their main
results.
Submitting your site to Google is very easy and absolutely free.
All you need to do is submit your home page URL to Google and your whole site
will be indexed. Click
to Submit your site to Google (Please note that for a new site Google can
take upto 3-6 months to improve your ranking after it
initially indexes it, so instead of worrying about why your ranking is low, you
can use this time to optimize and promote your website).
Google uses a "crawler or spider"
- robots that automatically index pages on the web - called GoogleBot.
Google usually takes an average of 6-8 weeks to index a newly submitted
site. When you submit your site URL to Google, GoogleBot pick's up and goes
through each link on each page. It reads through all your site pages to pick up
keywords, then saves and indexes the pages in its catalog cache. Thus it is
important for you to keep all your pages linking to each other so that the
google spiders have easy access to all your relevant pages. Another way to make
sure this is done is to have a Site Map for all you pages.
Very Important: Getting indexed by
GoogleBot is just the first step to getting ranked in Google, so don't expect
immediate results for your pages to show up in searches. Give it some time and
work on optimizing your web pages.
Not only is Google the single most important
search engine, it is also used to provide the "main results" for
various other search engines. As of now (August 2004), AOL Search, Netscape
(two of the top 10 search engines) and the Excite Network (at iWon,
MyWay, My Web Search) use Google for their main results. Google also provides
its "Paid Results Ads" to search engines like HotBot, Lycos, Ask
Jeeves and Teoma apart from AOL Search & Netscape.
Getting a high ranked in Google is different
from being indexed by the Google Spider - GoogleBot. You might have been
indexed by Google but your site might be one of hundreds of thousands in
connection with your keywords and you might not appear in the first 10 pages
(beyond which you can safely assume no one will seriously search).
This is mainly because Google looks at the
quality of the web pages linking to each site to obtain the most relevant
search results. Thus more than link popularity, link quality is what
matters to Google. In fact this is the single best way to get ranked with all
"crawler" based search engines. Build your site links by promoting
your site pages to as many relevant portals that accept external links -
especially those with top ranking in Google. You can also get into link exchanges
with top sites in google that have a good ranking (provided you keep a track of
these sites in case they do more harm than good). Google gives a different rank
for each of your pages so it is important to optimize your whole web site.
You need to also make sure you have valuable
content for Google searchers. What you can do is, concentrate on keywords
(or rather key phrases) that is unique to your content. This will also ensure
that you get more targeted visitors from Google.
Tips on Google Search Engine Optimization for your
web site