Surprisingly, many webmasters severely lack knowledge about one of the most important aspects of the internet – the search engines! We all know they exist, we know people use them, and we know that they drive traffic to our websites. But few people actually carry an understanding about how they work.

If you can educate yourself about the way search engines function, you’ll be more capable of optimizing your site properly.

So, here are the basic. Let the fun begin!

Search engines send automated “bots” to “crawl” the web through hyperlinks.

As I’ll discuss in a follow up bloggy post, without external hyperlinks to your website, the bots really have no way of finding your website. It’s still possible that they’ll discover your site eventually, but without some kind of effort on your part, it may be unlikely.

Only about half of the existing pages on the internet have been crawled by the search engines, if that gives you any indication of the importance of backlinks.

Once the bots crawl your website, it becomes indexed in a huge database along with all the other indexed pages on the internet. There are literally billions of pages stored in this database. Yet, as you’ve probably noticed, it takes barely a second or two to get results after performing a search. Unless your at my mom and dads, who have dial up. Oh, and a horse and buggy as well.

When searches are made, the engine quickly scans through relevant documents and provides results based on the most accurate possible matches. Generally a match is determined by the presence of that particular keyword on the webpage. Thus, on-page optimization is extremely important.

Google and the other search engines will provide differing results depending on whether you type the phrase as-is (purple umbrellas), in quotes (“purple umbrellas”), with the + symbol (purple + umbrellas),
or other variations.

After the SE has found matches for the search query, a special algorithm scans each of the results to determine relevance to the keyword phrase. Results are provided to the user in order from most relevant to least relevant. And here is what makes life sooo fun. The algorithms change hundreds of times a year!!

So what can you learn from this information? A few things:

• Your page must be relevant to the search term (listing the keyword several times throughout the course of the website, on-site optimization)
• You need external hyperlinks (backlinks) pointing to your website to act as a “gateway” for the bots to access your site.
• I need a purple umbrella.

As far as relevance goes, Google and the other search engines take all of these into consideration:

• On-site optimization
• Age of the domain (the older the better)
• Page Rank (PR)
• Alexa ranking (the ‘popularity’ of your website based on the amount of traffic it gets)
• Number of backlinks, particularly from high PR authority websites that are related to your website (if you have a blog about real estate, a high PR link from a real estate website will be more valuable than a high PR link from a website about dog grooming)
• Linking structure of the website (easy navigation)
• How cool you are (this one is is still unconfirmed)

So now you are smart! Go forth and rule the web!

If you want to check where you rank on the web, check out these FREE seo TOOLS!

Not all websites can have high rankings

There are billions of web pages on the Internet. It’s obvious that not all of them can be listed in the top 10 results on search engines. Search engines only list web pages that they find relevant to a special keyword. You must make sure that your website is such a site.
If search engines cannot find out that your website is about fishing equipment, they cannot give your website high rankings for that keyword. The process of changing your web pages so that search engines find them relevant is called search engine optimization (SEO).

A website must appear in the top 10 results

75% of searchers never look further than page one (Source: Georgia Institute of Technology). Most search engines display ten results on the first page; and very few searchers click the links to look at the second page. Usability expert Jakob Nielsen points out: “Users almost never look beyond the second page of search results.” Danny Sullivan, ClickZ Search Engine Marketing Columnist, puts it out this way: “Being listed 11 or beyond means that many people may miss your website.” For that reason, search engine optimization is crucial if you want to be successful with your website.

One of the most important things to understand about search engine optimization or “SEO” is how search engines work. It’s because of how they work that you will need to implement some seo rules into your website to get the desired results you’re looking for. Search engines use a list of critical operations that allow them to determine how information is found in their system. Once you understand how search engines work, it’s a bit easier to know how to ensure your website fits within their methods.

One of the things that search engines do is to crawl the web. These are automated programs that are often referred to as “spiders” or “bots”. They crawl throughout the web and take a look at 3 each of the documents and pages of websites that make up the web. It is important to note that these bots work, but they often work slower than the pace of the web. Some estimates show that of the 20 billion pages on the web, spiders have crawled through only half of them, if that.

Processing queries is another function of the search engine and that’s something that most people are familiar with. When you head over to, Google lets say, and search for information on weight loss, the search engine looks through its massive index of websites and documents and matches your query with the websites that seem to best fit it. Often, the phrase or terms within the website are found on the page in the manner that the searcher is looking for.

Yet another way that these search engines work is through indexing documents and pages. As mentioned, when the spiders crawl through your page, they gather important information about it and then they store these pages in an index. When someone searches for information relevant to the website, such as with the use of key phrases, this ultimately leads the search engine to work through billions of documents in seconds to produce a list (search engine results page) of options for the searcher.

Ranking is also an important process for search engines. In short, all of those indexed pages are ranked by how valuable they are to the searcher. The algorithm used is complex and impossible to know specifically, but through SEO practices and rules, we do know some of these factors, which are critical for you to understand if you hope to build a successful website.

There are many aspects of seo that should be implemented and there are many schools of in terms of what the right way to optimize a website should be. Some experts believe a very narrow approach should be taken while others believe that a more general approach is the better route to go.

SEO is the process of installing systems within your website that will show the search engines that the website is valuable to the person who is typing in the search. The search engines rate websites by how effective the website is at providing quality information. Without the use of these methods, websites with very little real information could be viewed by the searcher, reducing his or her chances of finding the information the searcher needs to make the decision he or she needs. In other words, by using search engine optimization, you develop a website that is effective at meeting the searcher’s needs which makes the search engines direct more traffic to your website.

A chunk of the traffic, or visitors, to a website will come from the search engines Google, Yahoo!, Bing and AskJeeves, though there are many others (not to mention Social Media’s impact). Each of these search engines has specific features it looks for in websites to determine how valuable they are to the person searching for content, information or resources. Your job, as the website owner or developer, is to design a website that proves to these search engines that the site is valuable. By doing this, you can increase the number of people coming to the site and increase your business’s success online.

Keep in mind that seo practices are not abusive of search engine guidelines but they are tailored to help encourage a balance of quality content with effective keywords and design. By learning SEO, you allow your website the ability to excel on the web. Without it, you may have a hard time getting the visitors you want to the site.

I think it had some validity, but seeing as most people I run into day in and day out still have a hard time deciphering the difference from a ‘Folder’ and a “Label” in Gmail, this thing had no future..read on

• Thumbnail view in the Docs List which allows you to preview your Docs.
• Spelling correction when searching for a doc.
• Upload any file limit increased from 250MB to 1GB.

Editions Included:
Standard, Premier, Education, Team and Partner Editions

Languages Included:
All languages supported by Google Docs

While the standard “list view” displays the item title and information like sharing state, the thumbnail view displays small previews of your files. We generate thumbnails for all Google Docs types and most common files (photos, PDFs, etc). You can toggle between the two using new buttons on the top right of the toolbar.

When combined with search by relevance, the thumbnail view makes it really easy to find the file you’re looking for.

And for all us spelling-challenged and typo-prone folks, we added spelling correction in search. Never again will you need to wonder how your search for “agedna” (agenda) came up with zero results.

Finally, Google recently finished rolling out the upload and store any file feature, so everyone should now be able to upload, store, and share any file in Google Docs. Google has also increased the maximum file size based on user feedback, so you can now uploads files up to 1 GB in size. Very nice!