Have you received emails or phone calls promising to get your website listed at the top of a Google search, for a fee? Offering to list your website with thousands of search engines? Unfortunately, these are most often empty promises and meaningless offers. There’s a whole lot of misinformation floating around about search engines, and here we’ll look at a few simple truths to help clear up all the confusion.
What a search engine actually does
A search engine works by sending software robots, often called “spiders,” out across a portion of the Internet to surf around and add information about what’s out there to a vast index, or database, which the search engine then consults when you ask it to find something for you.
When you type a query, or search terms, into a search engine’s box, it quickly looks through its database to see what matches your query. The results it gives back to you are based on what lives in its index at that moment. No search engine ever indexes everything on the internet; it’s simply too big. So search engines try to index only websites that actually offer quality information, so that when you search for something, the results will actually be useful to you.
Old-fashioned schemes and tricks
In the early days of the Internet, search engines were still experimenting with ways to improve the quality of the information in their databases about what content is on the web.Web developers devised all sorts of tricks and schemes to get their sites listed on top of other sites, and more often than not, search results were full of bogus spam sites and other cruft that didn’t serve the searcher’s needs.
What’s amazing and unfortunate today is that thousands of web developers and so-called search engine optimization specialists still try to use old-fashioned schemes and tricks to improve their customers’ search engine rankings. A handful of the more expensive schemers actually have updated tricks that sometimes work, but the cost in the long run to their customers can be devastating.
How Google dominated the search engines
The way that a search engine adds information about what it finds on the web to its index is the key to the quality of its information, and the reason that Google is the undisputed king of search engines is because it invented a better way than anyone else of choosing which websites to list in its index and how to prioritize their importance.
Google devised a complex system, or algorithm, for determining a site’s position in its listings based largely on how popular that site is. Google looks at how many other websites have links to the site in question, and also analyzes the content of the website itself to ensure that it’s worth visiting.
Google’s system is the very reason why when you type a search query into Google, you almost invariably get useful results back. This is why almost everyone the world uses Google predominantly as a general-purpose search engine.
The same system makes it literally impossible to scheme and trick Google into thinking that your website deserves a higher ranking than it does, at least in the long term. If you do manage the trick Google, through one of the schemers with the latest and greatest tricks (which tend to charge more than $2,000 a month), Google will eventually catch on, and will likely ban your site from its listings altogether.
Get your website a high ranking it deserves
So how do you get your website a nice position at the top of Google’s listings? You build useful content into your website, you structure your site properly on the back end, and you network with other website administrators in your industry to get them to link to your site.
One of the most basic — and imporant — steps you can take are to make sure your website is compliant with the standards recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium. These standards exist in part to make your site accessible to all users and all devices, and that just happens to include search engine spiders. If you make your website palatable to the search engines’ robots, they’ll be able to index your site correctly.
A few technical items such as keywords and title elements must be done correctly, but will not in and of themselves do anything for you. It’s essential to have correct and well-crafted keywords, descriptions and page titles. But that alone won’t do much.
The next step you can take is to have your web designer analyze the text and image content of your website to ensure that it is useful, thorough and straightforward. Content that reads like spam will not serve you. If your site’s primary goal is sales, perhaps you can provide something else on the site — such as information, articles, or some other freebie — that might attract visitors and keep them at your website even if they aren’t going to buy your products or services. This will help your search engine rankings.
Finally, it’s essential that you get other relevant websites to link to yours. You can ask other companies in your industry to link to your site, you can post comments on popular blog sites with your URL in them, and you can get listed on industry directories, often all for free. Without inbound links, you’re never going to get a high placement in a Google search result. It might even be helpful to buy sponsored ad spots from Google, although this can quickly grow very expensive, so you’ll want to keep a close eye on it. And, this is often not necessary.
Although we’ve focused on Google here, adopting these same practices — and avoiding schemes and tricks completely — will also help you with Yahoo and any other search engines. As for getting listed on “hundreds or thousands” of search engines, that’s just absurd. Google is by far the dominant and most important search engine, and a handful of others are still in business, and that’s all.
Tags: Google, optimization, ranking, search engines, seo