The Whole Truth About Search Engine Optimization
A Pet Sitter's Guide to Google, Yahoo and DMOZ

Part 2: Foundation

Web designers like me get frustrated when we see potential customers flock to certain companies because they promise precise (and very high) results for search engine optimization. The truth is, they can not guarantee a specific rank in search engine results. Gaining higher search engine ranking is highly competitive, and the results can change from constantly.

Search engines like Google claim to weigh more than 100 different factors when ranking pages, which may include incoming links, relevant keywords, or even the length of time the site has been live on the internet. Most of these factors, and the way that Google, Yahoo and others weight them in their algorithms, are closely guarded company secrets. From time to time Google even changes its formula--ever tweaking it to get more and more "perfect" results--causing cataclysmic changes in the web world. Sites which once ranked near the top suddenly slip a page or more behind, overnight. The rules are always changing, and so some of the advice from last year to boost your rankings is not the same advice you'll get today, and it will probably change again in less than six months. The basic principles of good design and sensible self-promotion however (which are the foundation of good search engine ranking), have more or less remained the same.

The truth is, you don't need to pay someone lots of money to understand the basic principles of search engine optimization, but if you don't know how to update your website, you might need to pay a designer to implement them.

Most of us may be surprised to find out that a search engine does not do what we think it does--or at least not the way we thought it did. When you use a search engine, you are not searching the internet. You are searching a database on a server that belongs to that company. They spend every moment of every day sending out little programs called bots or spiders to sift through the internet and send reports back about what they find. That information is sorted and categorized and then stored on the server. It may sit there for days or weeks or even longer, before it is updated. This database information is what you are searching through when you use a search engine. You are looking at a picture or a summary of the internet at some point in the past--but you are NOT looking at a representation of the internet as it is now.

It used to take search engines weeks and months to find your website for the very first time. Now that is changing. The internet and the computers connected to it have gotten faster. Sometimes it is possible for a search engine like Google to find your site in as little as a few days. Our own experiments suggest that Google may even find your website faster if you display ads from their AdWords program on your page. Click the link below to try AdWords out on your site (it also adds another source of revenue on your site).

A common myth is that search engines need you to submit your site for it to be indexed, and you need to regularly re-submit your site to stay on top. Search engines send out their bots and spiders, which travel by links from page to page and site to site over the net (like a giant spider web) until they find your site. If no other sites yet link to your pages, then indeed, you may need to submit your site in order to be found. If however, other sites do link to you, those bots may find you faster naturally, than by working their way down the backlogged submission list. Once you have been found and listed, resubmitting your site can not raise or lower your ranking, in and of itself. It simply tells the bots to come have a look at your site and see if you have made any fundamental changes to make note of. If you are paying a company money to continuously resubmit your site to search engines for the purpose of directly raising your ranking, then you are throwing your money away.