NOTT MARKETING SERVICES

Serving Results

The results displayed for any given query on the Google.com search engine will be different for every user. Because each computer's search history has been tracked and saved, the search engine anticipates your desired result and displays what amounts to a unique list of websites. The only way your home page can be guaranteed to pop up on the "first page" of a search engine's results on all machines is to purchase that position. The "SPONSORED RESULTS" on a typical yahoo.com results page can be found at the top, the bottom, and the right margin. Google's "ADS" appear on top of the page and in the right margin.

Obviously, any website owner with the money to spend does not have to worry about page rank ... for the rest of us, correctly coding our pages is the first step toward success.

Best Practices for Ranking Well in Search Engines

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a lucrative business. Since Google.com is the largest and most popular search business in the world, I thought I would share the main tenets and industry 'best practices' regarding search. So many of my clients believe that once their websites go live, they will be found on the first page of Google the day after they're published. Well, that is actually possible if you purchase a sponsored advertisement from Google.com, and your link will join other sponsored ads in your category at the top of the page. This discussion, though will be limited to natural search, which is all about careful website composition and coding and relevance. Below I have interlaced some of my own observations and commentary with guidelines I downloaded from Google.

Delivery of Search Results : Crawling - Indexing - Serving

Crawling is the process by which Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index. A huge set of computers "crawls" billions of pages on the web. The program that does the fetching is called Googlebot (also known as a robot, bot, or spider). Googlebot uses an algorithmic process: computer programs determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site. Google's crawl process begins with a list of web page URLs, generated from previous crawls, and augmented with Sitemap data provided by webmasters. As Googlebot visits each of these websites it detects links on each page and adds them to its list of pages to crawl. Coded into the page background are instructions that the robots read regarding the treatment of outbound links, the frequency with which to crawl the page, words used to describe graphics on the page, and the most relevant, specific words identifying the meaning behind the webpage. What it boils down to is basic composition and use of clear language.

Googlebot processes each of the pages it crawls in order to compile a massive index of all the words it sees and their location on each page. In addition, they process information included in key content tags and attributes, such as Title tags and ALT attributes. Googlebot can process many, but not all, content types. For example, they cannot process the content of some rich media files or dynamic pages. When a user enters a query, the machines search the index for matching pages and return the results which are the most relevant to the user. Relevancy is determined by over 200 factors, one of which is the PageRank for a given page. PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In simple terms, each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site's PageRank. The best types of links are those that are given based on the quality of your content.

In order for your site to rank well in search results pages, it's important to make sure that Google can crawl and index your site correctly. Google's Webmaster Guidelines outline some best practices that can help you avoid common pitfalls and improve your site's ranking. If a site ranks well for a keyword, it's because we've algorithmically determined that its content is more relevant to the user's query. Google keeps the search side of their business separate from their AdWords service and does not accept payment to crawl a site more frequently.