Web Site Search Engine Optimization

Don’t try to fool the engines

Some Webmasters try to cheat search engines, eg by cloaking (delivering special pages to search engine indexing software depending on the requesting engine) or filling pages with “hidden” text of the same color as the page background.

Such techniques are to be strongly discouraged. If caught, your site could be excluded from the engines with a dramatic drop in traffic.

Link Popularity

Link popularity refers to the number of other sites linking to a given site. Search engines use link popularity as an indication of a site’s quality. This is based on the idea that if a site is good, lots of other sites will link to it. The quality of the linking sites also carries weight.

Google uses the term Page Rank (PR) to indicate the quality or importance of a site determined by its link popularity. Install the Google Toolbar to view sites’ Page Ranks. (NB it is widely believed Google uses a different system from the published Page Ranks to rank search results.)

In order to increase their rankings in the search engines Webmasters try to get links to their site to appear on other sites. This may be achieved by:

Submitting sites to major directories such as dmoz. It is also worthwhile submitting to subject specific directories relating to your site’s topic.
Writing free articles for publication on other sites and ezines. Be sure to require that any sites using your material provide a link back to your site.
Posting to USENET and Web forums. Use your expertise to answer correspondents’ queries, including your link at the bottom of your posting.
Link exchanges. Contact other RELEVANT sites to suggest a reciprocal posting of links. Add a message to your links page inviting link exchanges. However, be sure only to exchange links with related sites, not with free-for-all link farms as the engines may punish you for linking to these.

Be patient

Once you become known to the engines its “robots” will visit to re-spider (index) your site every few days. However, it can take time for your changes to be reflected in the engines. It is rumoured that Google keeps new sites in a “sand box” for a few months before allowing them to rise in the ratings.

Pages tend to be re-ranked in discrete jumps rather than as a continuous process. One of the author’s sites went from PR 0 to PR 4 overnight.