If the internet is the Wild West, then search engines are the gunslingers—they decide what sites will be visited or not. If the search engines don’t like your site, you just won’t get found.
If you look at the market share of the search engines, Google is by far the most dominant. The market share breakout for 2007 is as follows:
1. Google 68%
2. Yahoo 16.9%
3. Live Search (MSN) 10.1%
4. AOL 2.0%
5. Ask 1.5%
In fact, these five search engines account for 98% of the market.
A spider is the name of the software robots that crawl around the web looking for and evaluating websites. Google has two main spiders. Googelbot is the spider that records the location of the websites and the content that is found. The second spider is Freshbot which looks for updates to websites. Generally, Google spiders will visit the average site twice a month.
The reason that this is relevant is that 80% of Google users prefer organic results for a search rather than using a directory or direct entry of the URL or other means. So, the question becomes, how do you maximize your Google ranking?
Here are a few things that you can do:
– Page Tags: Every page needs to be named with the appropriate Meta tag names.
– Page Names: Every page on your site needs to be named with keywords.
– Relevance: Relevance is how closely the keywords in your copy match the keywords in a search.
– Keyword Density: The new rule of thumb is 7 keywords per 100 words of copy.
– Inbound Links: A link from a site outside of your site that directs traffic to your site.
– Relevant and Fresh Content: Daily updates are best. This explains why blogs are so effective at increasing rank.
Manage these things and your Google rank will rise.
John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2008 All rights reserved.
Nothing wrong with this, at all, people should get it more.