In many of my class presentations, I take a few minutes to review the basics of a Google search operation. I just “stumbled upon” a great summary of the Google operation on the web.
This is a nice step-by-step guide to what happens when someone goes to Google and looks for something. It is all interesting, but the key parts for people wanting to get rankings for their sites is understanding the “index” database (where the engine stores all the information that will later be provided in a search, as well as the information that will determine who ranks where in the search results), and understanding the importance of the links that Google tabulates.
There is not much discussion here of where the links come from or how they are evaluated, but that is what we have the free Internet marketing Clinic for. Stop by some Wednesday evening when we are in session and see how we can help you promote your business over the web!
PS: If the StumbleUpon link above stops working, you can read the article at its original location here, “How Google Works“
Google’s latest algorithm update is anticipated to have an impact on web sites that might not have performed well under the prior algorithm. Comments on the Google Webmaster blog recently indicate that sites with lower traffic should perform better in searches typically described as “long tail” because they use keyword phrases that are not the high volume phrases that much SEO effort focuses its attention on.
What this means (we think?) is that the technique that we espouse in our clinic discussions of making sure that your site pays attention to all the phrases that might be relevant to your content instead of focusing all your effort on just the top ranking phrases could experience a great boost in results. To put it another way, if you have worked on phrases when developing your content that are further down the list of ranking phrases, this might mean a big payoff for your approach!
This is the kind of thing we think is a great reward for “doing things the right way” from the beginning! As always, we try to provide you with the techniques that have staying power with search engines, not the “tricks” that fool the engines for a short time, but the practices that are consistent with improved quality of content and improved performance results for the search engines. We encourage a “win-win”approach to marketing, something that works for you and for the search engines at the same time.
February 18th, 2010
admin
I just came across an interesting posting that talks about “Listening to Your Customers to Adjust Your Keywords“. The author emphasizes the importance of keeping your keyword research up to date, which is always good advice, but he goes on to describe a neat little trick to help you do so.
He suggests using Google Alerts to get information about targeted keyword phrases. The neat part is that he tells you how to send the alerts to an RSS feed instead of your email, and refers to software that will turn that feed into a “word cloud” to show which words are used more often.
A “word cloud” is simply a box full of words where the ones that are used more often are bigger. It is a visual way to quickly see which words in the box get referred to more often.