SEO
Relationship between SEO and search engines
According to Wikipedia the term “Search Engine Optimization” did not appear until 1997, a few years after search engines emerged. The enginers at some of the search engines that some webmaster community were trying to rank well in their search engines, and even manipulating their rankings in the search results. In some early search engines, such as Infoseek, ranking first was as easy as grabbing the source code of the top-ranked page, placing it on your website, and submitting a URL to instantly index and rank that page.
Due to the high value and targeting of search results, there is potential for an adversarial relationship between search engines and SEOs.
Some more aggressive site owners and SEOs generate automated sites or employ techniques that eventually get domains banned from the search engines. Many search engine optimization companies, which sell services, employ long-term, low-risk strategies, and most SEO firms that do employ high-risk strategies do so on their own affiliate, lead-generation, or content sites, instead of risking client websites.
Some SEO companies employ aggressive techniques that get their client websites banned from the search results. The Wall Street Journal profiled a company that allegedly used high-risk techniques and failed to disclose those risks to its client Wired reported the same company sued a blogger for mentioning that they were banned. I have confirmed Google did in fact ban Traffic Power and some of its clients.
Some search engines have also reached out to the SEO industry, and are frequent sponsors and guests at SEO conferences and seminars. In fact, with the advent of paid inclusion, some search engines now have a vested interest in the health of the optimization community. All of the main search engines provide information/guidelines to help with site optimization: Google’s, Yahoo!’s, MSN’s and Ask.com’s. Google has a Sitemaps program to help webmasters learn if Google is having any problems indexing their website and also provides data on Google traffic to the website. Yahoo! has Site Explorer that provides a way to submit your URLs for free (like MSN/Google), determine how many pages are in the Yahoo! index and drill down on inlinks to deep pages. Yahoo! has an Ambassador Program and Google has a program for qualifying Google Advertising Professionals. I have both certifications. I don’t post them on my web site because the information provided is not secure and people have tried my creditials listed on my web site to mislead customers about their skills.
Getting into search engines’ databases
Just because you have a web site doesn’t mean your going to get listed in Google or Yahoo. You will need to submit your site to Google and Yahoo.
Google and Yahoo offer submission programs, such as Google Sitemaps, for which an XML type feed can be created and submitted. Generally, however, that alone will not get you listed well in the search engines.
Read our Web Site article that provides some information on how to improve your SEO results.
The best way to show up on the search engines is to have other pages link to your site that are already spidered by Google and the other search engines. It can take a few days or even weeks from the acquisition of a link from such a site for all the main search engine spiders to begin indexing a new site, and there is usually not much that can be done to speed up this process.
