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Google Creates a Search Engine Optimization Guide

November 15, 2008 By 12 Comments

Well this was a shocker for me, I never thought I would hear of Google encouraging search engine optimization but sure enough they created the “Search Engine Optimization Guide” and posted it on the official blog.  This is one of those moves that I won’t completely understand but it does make you wonder; why would a search engine want to teach you how to manipulate their algorithm?

My analysis on this would be that they are fully aware that the sites that rank well in their algorithms are due to people gaming the system, so by logic the most skilled internet marketers will be the ones that rise to the top.  As a result, the best content will typically go with these marketers as all sides are trying to maximize their profits, but they realize this creates a system where it becomes extremely difficult for an average person to climb through the hierarchy.

In short, I view it as a move that signals the start of a trend of decentralization of power as they try to give some of the smaller websites a shot at some of the keywords that haven’t spent as much time building links.  As the ebook is heavily focused in on the various on-page SEO factors I feel it plays into the trend I have been noticing in which Google has started putting far more emphasis on the on-page factors than they have in the past.

One way or another, it was certainly an intriguing move and it looks like it will work out to be a good resource for new webmasters.  Hopefully they add it to their webmaster guidelines so that all new marketers can see it and get a little boost in the right direction.  Since I’m sure you guys would like to read it yourself you can either visit the official Google blog, or download the ebook.

On that note feel free to download my own ebook, which goes into the SEO topics that Google will never share with anyone else.

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How to Get your Site Indexed in Under 2 Days

November 11, 2008 By 7 Comments

I have been bombarded with emails lately from people asking me how to quickly get a new site in Google, so this post is for those of you with new sites or old sites that need some new love.  Typically when I create a new website I see it indexed the day I post it, and I have seen sites get indexed within 1-2 hours of their creation.  While getting indexed quickly is always fun, just remember that being in the index doesn’t necessarily mean you will rank for any valuable keywords, or even for the name of your own site for that matter.

The first thing you should do once your website is live is post the domain to Google and other search engines.  I have always used AddMe for my search engine submission just because it was the first thing on Google when I created my first website and they have never let me down.  I wouldn’t sign up for the newsletter though, it is basically just all advertisements.

The second thing you should do is create a sitemap and submit this to Google’s Webmaster Tools, this will ensure that all of your content gets included in the index, not just your homepage.  There are plenty of free tools out there to create a sitemap, I typically just use whatever is at the top of a Google search.

The third step is to check your website’s onpage search engine optimization, especially check to see that every page links to another page in some way, try to have as many pages link to each other as possible to give a more thorough distribution of PageRank and spidering later on in the process.

The fourth step is pretty simple, create a robots.txt file for your website.  Without a robots.txt file search engines are not allowed to index your website, and as a result you won’t ever get indexed.  Just create a blank text file that says “User-agent: *” then next line “Disallow: ” named robots.txt and put it on the domain level directory on your server.  Leave disallow blank unless you have pages you don’t want indexed.

The fifth step is the most fun, because this is where you will get your first backlinks to your website.  This is the key to getting indexed in hours.  The way that Google determines when to index your site is either by putting you in a line via webmaster tools, or by finding your site via their crawler.  It can take months to get indexed without any backlinks, so it is essential that you build backlinks pointing to your site.  The way I typically do this is by submitting my site to StumbleUpon, Digg, and Furl then I go onto all of the forums I post on, and change my signature to have a link to my new website.  As a result, I rarely have to wait more than 5 hours to get indexed.  To make this even more likely to be successful, post on popular do-follow blogs as well.

Sixth step is simply checking the results, a day or so after following these steps try typing site:www.yourdomain.com and see whether you have made it into Google.  If you are, congratulations, start working on your content and building relevant links to start ranking for keywords.  If you aren’t wait 3 days and if you still aren’t then start commenting on more blog posts, especially new ones.

With this site, I typically see my new posts indexed within half an hour, I have seen them indexed in as little as 7 minutes before (As a side note, this post got indexed 5 minutes after it was posted).  To get more tips and tricks download my new ebook which is an internet marketing ebook with a focus on blogging, “Blogging 101: Traffic and Link Development Tips”.

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