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Preparing your site for Searching
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| Search engines scour the web using automated web browsers called robots or spiders.
These browsers look at the text on the pages on your site and try to make sense
of what is found so that the page can be indexed (included in search engine results).
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| Standard web browsers such as Internet Explorer
and Mozilla are quite forgiving and some even have special modes (known as Quirks Mode) to allow web sites to be displayed
even if there are errors in the page. Search engines often exclude pages with errors
and also require that the pages have special meta tags with descriptions and keywords.
Every search engine is different and the algorithm (method) used to determine page
merit is updated frequently as the search engines are adapted to ensure that they
return relevant results in response to search queries. Furthermore, search engines
use auxiliary files such as site maps and a special file called robots.txt to find
pages and to determine which pages to include along with their relative importance. |
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Google's Dominance
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| An examination of our statistics across all of our web sites shows that of all
visitors originating from search engine queries, more than 90% originate from Google.
One can, based on these statistics, infer that Google is probably used by more people
searching for information than other search engines. This predominance means that
one should ensure that the site is set-up to conform with Google's requirements
primarily, but the other search engines should not be neglected. For instance, Google
ignores the keyword meta tag but as other search engines use that information, we
always include the keywords. |
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Webmaster Tools
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Google provides a set of tools that are used to help web masters with site submission
including verification of site maps and robots files and this tool set has many
other features. We use these tools to prepare our clients' websites for promotion,
to submit the sites and to keep track of the results. What this means is that any
errors are corrected and certain changes are made, based on feedback from the tools,
that optimise the site for Google, and, as a by-product, the improvements can improve
rankings on the other search engines, as well. |
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Search Ranking - Words vs Phrases
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| It is almost impossible to achieve a ranking on the first page of the search results
for anything except the most obscure searches. It helps to use search phrases as
these return fewer results than single words. For example the word "safari returns
60.5 million results (you have less chance of achieving a top ranking than winning
the lottery at 13.9 million to one) whereas "safari Punda Maria" (the name of the
Northern Gate in the Kruger National Park) returns only 19300 results. It is obviously
easier to achieve a higher ranking on a phrase rather than on a single word. However,
with 19300 results in total and only 10 results on the first search page, your site's
chances of appearing on the first page are still relatively slim. |
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Promises of First Page Ranking
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| Bearing in mind the
aforegoing, it is easy to see that promises by web site promotion
companies that you will achieve a first place or even a first page ranking should
be taken with a pinch of salt! There are certain web submission packages that submit
many web pages repeatedly to search engines. |
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Many search engines, Google included,
will blacklist and refuse to index a site, at all, if they believe that submissions
are being made improperly. |
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Why bother optimising for search engines?
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| It may seem from the foregoing that there is no point in optimising for search
engines. This is not true as the search engines change their result sets and algorithms
continually and your site will, if properly designed and optimised, receive traffic
from search engines. However, it is obvious that merely optimising for search is
not the complete answer - something more is required. Your site needs to be setup
correctly in order to benefit from AdWords, the other weapon in our promotional
arsenal.
Learn more...
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