Week 3 - DQ 2

Week 3 - DQ 2  Based on McElgunn’s (2008) experience with Google®, describe some ways to increase your site’s search engine ranking.

Search term used: search engine optimization for Google. In just 0.28 seconds, I received about 18,100,000 results for this term, as well as a list of related searches for how to please Google. Besides being the largest search engine, Google draws users by it's democratic business polcies. Getting your site indexed by Google, espcially getting a high page rank to land you on top of results page, is the way to get led by your Internet hand to the Web's version of a land flowing with milk and honey. Clearly, lots of people are interested in learning the best way to dance with one of the Internet's best known partners.

According to McElgunn, one of the strategies to accomplish this is by social bookmarking. This is the practice of saving bookmarks to a public website and "tagging" them with keywords. An abundance of these backlinks are translated by the Googlebot as a sign of relevance to search terms, or keywords. Google acknowledges site popularity as relevance: an key strategy to the top of their results page.

It is also important to keep Google informed about your site. When adding new content, submit a new site map to Google. In turn, Google will " help you correct any errors in the sitemap to make its indexing more accurate". Apparently the Google spider is trained to crawl when it senses movement, so keeping your content updated is a good way to attract it's attention.

Optimizing your page to a keyword is an interesting search term to Google, in and of itself. The tip I thought the goofiest was hiding your term in the background by making it the same color of your layout page. Incidently, Google considers this keyword stuffing, and will boot a site that does so inappropriately. A better way is to include search terms in tags and titles "as part of a strategy to focus each page's content and labelling on specific keywords"(Wilson, 2009). Google offers its own web analytic tool at Google Analytics to conduct experiments regarding the effectiveness of keywords.

Since Google's spider is said to be limited in recognizing images, making use of the alt tag with images is another important strategy of SEO. This also aids in making sites accessible to visually impaired users. Google rewards web masters that do this by increasing page rank in results pages.

If you are serious about optimizing your site for Google, I would suggest starting with what Google has to say about optimizing for Google. From what I've read from Google about Google, relevence to a user search term is the primary consideration, and it must be presented in quality content. They also provide several free web analytic tools designed to help you optimize your site for their search engine, which can be accessed at: Google Analytics. Nothing beats getting the information from the most direct source.

Just because you hear so much about Google SEO, I found some information about SEO for MSN, Yahoo, and the differences between the "Big Three" when it comes to SEO techniques.

Top 16 Yahoo SEO Tips     SEO for MSN    

Debra Contreras:

"As you meet your brain, you will realize your infinite value, and become an 'artist of life.'

Then you can create new values, a new culture, and a new world." Ilchi Lee 

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