As Google is the most popular search engine now it extremely important to be ranked high in Google searches. Google reached the status of being the search engine most used by giving the most useful results. Google commands according to some sources over 60% of the search market.

Google moved up quickly while many of the search engine were scrambling to make a profit or at least to continue to exist after the dot.com bubble burst and there weren’t a bunch of venture capitalist investing heavily into website. Many of the search engines made you pay a fee to submit your site to be indexed by them. This cut out the small sites that provided valuable information but were not on the web to make a profit.

Therefore Google started to have the cleanest result because they had superior technology and allowed all sites to submit to them for free. Their results are clean and there is little possibility to type in a keyword and get a porn site.

I have usually found Google to be by far the most useful Search Engine when I researched thing on the web and I could make hundreds of searches in one day. I avoided as much as possible sites that were just trying to get money from you. Some of the sites only include site that paid to be in their search results.

Google ignored meta tags (my understanding is they still do), hidden text, overuse of keys words, spamming techniques and other tricks that professional would use to trick many of the other search engines.

When Google dramatically increased in popularity several extremely popular search engines saw searches on their sites drop dramatically to where they only had minor portions of the total searches. Some of the most popular search sites such as Infoseek, Excite, Lycos, HotBot and AltaVista, who used to be dominate now only have a small percentage of search traffic.

Google works with AOL Search, Netscape, Go, iWon and also allows individuals to put their Search Box on their own sites, which I have done myself. A great reason to put their Search Box on you website is the fact that you can get revenue from it through their Adsense program.

Personally I believe if you want to give yourself a high ranking on Google you should add as much, useful and interesting material that you can on your subject, and not put much effort to do things to trick the search engine to give greater importance to your site.

This does not mean you should not do any Search Engine Optimization but it should not be your main technique to get higher rankings. See our section of Search Engine Optimization to get some advice how to cleanly do this.

For years Google lost money, but when they put pay-per-click ads on their search results they finally made a profit.

Google made another brilliant move when they started the Google Adsense Program, which is a good source of income for information websites. After you join the Google Adsense programs you get paid when people click Google ads on your site, with absolutely no work on your part besides entering some code on your page that they give you.

Google Information for Webmasters
http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html At this link is a list of do and do nots for webmasters to follow. Definitely worth check out.

Personal Google Example
An example of how important Google is to your results can be seen by the amount of extra page views that I received after getting a good page ranking from Google.

In December 2004 I was receiving around 2000 page view a day. I then decided to put on ads from Google’s Adsense program in the beginning of January 2005. In this program Google puts ads on your site that are similar to your subject matter. As proper ads were not appearing on the US state pages, I realized that for some reason they were not being indexed properly by Google.

At this time I came up as the number 3 site on the first page on Google when you typed in “Vegetarian Restaurants,” so I knew that Google considered my web site to be a valuable resource on this subject. When I typed in “Florida Vegetarian Restaurants,” my website did not come up on the top three pages on Google.

As the USA pages were traditionally the most hit pages on my site, I then put a link to these pages directly from my home page and not just from my USA page. This made it so the pages were indexed properly. Then when I typed in “Florida Vegetarian Restaurants,” my site came up number one on the first page of the search results on Google.

After doing this I found my site increase page views from around 2000 page views a day to over 4000 page views a day. The conclusion is that if you actually have information that is valuable on your subject and you are not just trying to trick the Google you will get great results if you rank high on Google Results. Another point that can be learned from this example is the importance of having a Site Map on your site to insure that you get properly indexed by the search engines.

Google Algorithm
The Google algorithm is a mathematical calculation of various things that Google takes into consideration when it decides how high various sites show up after a search is done by Google. The calculation takes into account the text on the pages and the amount of links that come to your website and how relevant and important they are.

One weakness with giving great importance to the amount of links to a page is that the website that have been around longer have a large advantage for two reason, one is that they have had a longer time for people to link to them, and also in the past there were less sites to link to and therefore it was easier to get an important link. Now many popular site whose links from are more valuable are satisfied with the amount of links they have coming to them from various sources and therefore it is harder to get a reciprocal link from these sites.

For Google links that come from pages that have high PageRank with Google are given much more value. Important links increase your PageRank in a much greater way than links from site that have a low PageRank.

But high PageRank of a site giving you a link is not the only important issue in reference to asking for a link, but also important is how relevant the page that you receive a link from is to your site. The more similar the pages that link to you are better quality links. For instance a site from a farmer’s site to a baseball site may have no real value to increase the baseball site.

This is why when people ask me for links or when I look for sites to ask for links I always first ask the question: What do these sites have to do for me? If they have nothing to do with you, no matter how high their PageRank, they can often only increase your PageRank very little, if at all.

How Often Google Crawls Internet
Google crawls the web about once a month. After you submit a site you have to wait until the Google’s spider crawls (searches) the web for new site to be indexed. This is also true when you add new pages to your site. Google usually indexes your main Home Page first, and then it will search down level by level along your site.

I have found that it can take two or three months before a fairly large site will be fully indexed. Also parts of the index may not be properly indexed for various reasons which may be difficult to understand. This is why it is a good reason to have a Site Map with a link to it on the main Home Page.

Check to See If Your Site Was Indexed
To see if a page has been picked up by Google you first go to
www.google.com and use the “allinurl” command in the search box: allinurl:yourdomain.com/yourpage.html

“Yourdomain.com/yourpage.html” is the URL of the page you want to check.

If you want to see all the pages on your site that Google has indexed you use the site command, which is site:yourdomain.com (a word or words that are used in all your pages such as the copyright statement). After using this command in Google if you see a bunch of the new page you added to your site, then you can assume that Google has found these pages and indexed them