Search engines are a very competitive environment so how they work is a well guarded secret. Google in particular is so sophisticated and successful that it represents over 80% of all searches, leaving the impression with many that there's a giant elephant in the room.
Six Point Engine Tune Up 1. Get rid of hidden text or hidden links.
2. Flush out cloaking or sneaky redirects.
3. Cut out lines of automated queries to Google.
4. Rout out multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
5. Loosen and remove "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
6. Extremely Important: Rev down (don't overuse) keywords.
Focus on the needs of your users and provide unique and relevant content that influences them to visit your site first.
Here are the basics that you need to know:
* Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users.* Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
* Good website design will prevent web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" linking to your site without your knowledge. (Your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.) Don't be lured by businesses that promise overnight improved visibility, for a price no less.
If you want to improve your website's performance here is a simple set of guidelines for you to follow:
Start with the basics:
1. Have a well structured website .
2. Include a sitemap and register your site. Many people don't know what a sitemap is, or how it is used by Search Engines, let alone how to construct one.3. If you use Gmail you can get free access to Google's webmaster tools to help you with these processes.
4. In order to stand out your website has to offer information that is useful and rich. There are no short cuts to quality content. It is also the only way to maintain your user's interest beyond the first experience that results from a search, and hopefully return another day.
5. Your information needs to be relevant.
How is relevancy determined? This is a very important question.
Here is Google's explanation:
"Google 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. When a user enters a query, our machines search the index for matching pages and return the results we believe 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. Not all links are equal: Google works hard to improve the user experience by identifying spam links and other practices that negatively impact search results. The best types of links are those that are given based on the quality of your content."A final bit of advice, be patient. It will take time for you to develop a valued website. It will also take time for your website to become recognized as a valuable website.
Gina
your inspiration zone
www.contemporaryquiltart.org
Gina is a self taught fiber artist. She has developed a traditional craft in unique ways. Color and simple shapes drive the quilt making process. Using her own hand dyed fabrics, she combines traditional techniques and patterns in bright and vivid contemporary expressions.
Great posting! This is helpful not only for the owner of a website, but also for those who come to use it. Too many websites have been a nuissance. The "pedagogics" of Google are valuable for the internet. Where would we be without them? In a jungle of dishonest, chaotic and badly kept websites. I'm glad we have these guidelines.
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