Going Back Google Basics

I have so many clients who use our social media press release services yet when I look at their site I notice that if they just add some basic SEO to their site, They will start showing up in search engines. At PRUnderground, aside from paying $29.95 for a press release, we also analyze your site and

give you free tips and advice on how to increase your rankings. My clients are usually shocked that we truly do get the word out not just with a press release but by actually speaking to you and helping you polish your site for SEO purposes.

I figured it was time to go back to basics and explain to my clients how Google finds your website and what to do in order to be found. I will break this up into 2 different post. The first post will be about how Google Crawls and Indexes your website. The second part which will be up next week, I will show you simple steps to take to guarantee you are found by Google.

OK in order for you to understand the basic SEO needs for your website, you need to know how Google delivers search results. Google uses series of actions in delivering search results. Listed below are the 3 channels Google uses:

Crawling – In order for Google to find your website they must crawl the web using Googlebots. There are 2 ways Google accomplishes this. The first is manually done by you. All you have to do is go to www.google.com/addurl.html and submit your URL. The second is crawling with Googlebots. Google does a great job in explaining what  crawling is:

“Crawling is the process by which Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index.We use a huge set of computers to fetch (or “crawl”) billions of pages on the web. The program that does the fetching is called Googlebot (also known as a robot, bot, or spider). Googlebot uses an algorithmic process: computer programs determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site.

Google’s crawl process begins with a list of web page URLs, generated from previous crawl processes, and augmented with Sitemap data provided by webmasters. As Googlebot visits each of these websites it detects links on each page and adds them to its list of pages to crawl. New sites, changes to existing sites, and dead links are noted and used to update the Google index.

Google doesn’t accept payment to crawl a site more frequently, and we keep the search side of our business separate from our revenue-generating AdWords service.”

Indexing – Indexing is the next important step Google uses. Once again let’s hear it direct from Google:

“Googlebot processes each of the pages it crawls in order to compile a massive index of all the words it sees and their location on each page. In addition, we process information included in key content tags and attributes, such as Title tags and ALT attributes. Googlebot can process many, but not all, content types. For example, we cannot process the content of some rich media files or dynamic pages.”

Query Results – There are several parts to this. Here is how Google explains it:

When a user enters a query, our machines search the index for matching pages and return the results we believe are the most relevant to the user. Relevancy is determined by over 200 factors, one of which is the PageRank for a given page. PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In simple terms, each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site’s PageRank. Not all links are equal: Google works hard to improve the user experience by identifying spam links and other practices that negatively impact search results. The best types of links are those that are given based on the quality of your content.

In order for your site to rank well in search results pages, it’s important to make sure that Google can crawl and index your site correctly.

So the question is….How do I make sure my website ranks well? That my friends will be answered next week. If you like, you may also submit a Social Media Press Release for $29.95 (Great for link building). I would be happy to walk you through your website and give you FREE tips on basic SEO needs that will help you rank, be found and get the word out.

-Alex Miranda

Twitter: @prunderground

Facebook: PRUnderground