Site Design for Better Search Engine
Positioning - Part II
Search engines are becoming increasingly selective about what pages
they include. There is good reasoning for this. Take for instance
the search results you have gotten when searching on a topic. I'll
bet at least one or two of the high ranking links you went to had
nothing to do with what you were searching for. Am I correct about
that? As time has gone by, unscrupulous webmasters and SEO's have
caused this problem. They have found ways to manipulate the search
engine results, and add words to pages simply because the words
are searched for frequently. If the words applied to the topic on
their pages then that would be fine. The problem is that most times,
the words have nothing to do with their page topic. Search engines
are trying to get away from this kind of manipulation. That is evident
in the latest buzz about Google and their Florida update.
There is only one way to guarantee your pages to be included in
search engine results. That guarantee is through paid inclusion.
Most of the search engines have gone to this. I think it's just
a way for them to capitalize on our need for them, and increase
the revenue they already generate. Most of them put these results
at the top of the search results page. The honorable search engines
separate them and let you know that they are sponsored results.
In short, to get paid inclusion on search results, you pay a fee
to the search engine. It's almost like buying advertisement, but
it is highly targeted advertisement. It differs from banners in
the fact that banners are usually random and can show up on any
page. Paid inclusion only shows up when a visitor searches for words
relevant to the keywords you choose when you buy the inclusion.
Since I do not pay for this type of inclusion, I am unsure if you
can buy placement for keywords your page topic does not apply to.
Now we'll move onto the relationships between the different search
engines.
Identifying Some of the Spiders and Bots - Knowing if your Page
was Visited?
That is a difficult thing to determine. Many search engines allow
you to query their search results with your URL. You will need to
look around at their information to learn how. Most of them have
a page for webmasters to answer such question. Another way to know
is by looking at your access logs. If you are on a free host, then
chances are that you will not have access to logs. If you pay for
your web hosting, like Sanders Consultation Group Plus, then your
hosting company should provide you access to your logs. We download
ours on a daily basis to see where people are coming from and who
referred them. If you have a free host, then there are free services
out there that will help track this information for you. Below are
a few of them for you to choose from.
Add
Free Stats
Counted
FreeStats
MasterStats
Sitetracker
When you look at your logs, if you see something out of place,
then chances are that it was probably a spider or bot of some kind
that visited your page or site. Most of them do not show a URL.
They show names instead. For instance, if you find a reference in
your logs to Scrubby/2.1, then chances are that your page or site
has been spidered by Scrub
The Web. If you find reference to Googlebot,
I am sure you can figure that one out on your own. A simple solution
to find out is to visit your favorite search engine and do a search
on the abnormal listing. Remember that abnormal listings are those
that will usually refer to a name, and usually do not have a full
URL included. Others we have found in our logs include Gigabot (Gigablasts
indexing agent), Marvin v0.3 (http://www.hon.ch/MedHunt/Marvin.html
and I have NO idea why he visited my site), and Claymont.com
(Claymonts indexing agent). To see our list of present user agents
(spiders and bots) you can check out our user
agent page. Special thanks to Gary
Keith for his continued dedication to this project, and without
him, we would not be able to make this page available. If you prefer
not to seach for the obscure note in your logs, you can just drop
by Gary's site instead. Should you find something that isn't indexed
in his database, please do us a favor and submit
it to Gary. He has made it a life's work to track these critters,
and your help will allow him to identify them for all of us. Thanks
again Gary.
Search engine companies are competitive, but each of them started
out as small kids on the block. When they start out, it's hard to
get the information they need to supplement their index. Adding
sites is a time involved process, especially if they do not have
their own spiders and bots to automate the process. Algorithms and
filters need written to make the results relevant. Some of them
use other engines to supplement their indexes. What that means to
site owners is that by being included in one search engines index
you could show up in many others indexes. This is a back door approach
to search engine positioning. It is a way to get inclusion to search
engines you have not been able to get results with. By paying close
attention to the submission requirements of an easier search engines
submission policy, you can ensure your inclusion with them and possibly
gain inclusion in a more popular search engine. To take advantage
of this, you need to know how the search engines are related, and
which search engine to concentrate on to use as a stepping stone
to the next.
Back
to Table of Contents
Terminology to Understand (Article Continues)
Other Search Engine Positioning Articles:
Related E-Book Downloads
By James R. Sanders
January 15, 2004
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About the Author
James R. Sanders is the owner of Sanders
Consultation Group Plus. He has been a webmaster and website designer since
1997. He has also been involved in self employment ventures since 1992. He is
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and has been published through WebProNews
and 4Rankings.com.
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