Search engines have become essential when browsing the web. There’s no doubt about it. With the wealth of information on the internet these days, we need good tools to help us find what we’re looking for. Take Google for example. It is for most users the central source of information on the internet and it is incredibly successful because of its ability to match relevant information against our search queries.

The crux of Google’s search engine is an algorithm called PageRank. Essentially, PageRank is a number which represents how important a page is on the web. One of the factors which contribute to the importance of a page is the number of other pages linked to it and the relative rankings of these pages. The more important a page, the more important the links present on that page. For the mathematically inclined amongst us, check out the PageRank description on WebWorkshop.

There are other factors that determine the importance of a page. The process of modifying a page to obtain the best ranking is known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). If you are a webmaster, the first step is to Add your URL to Google. Following that, the following tips could be handy to improve your ranking:

• Keywords in the title
• Keywords in a H1, H2 or H3 heading
• Keywords without style as first usage
• Keywords in bold not as first usage
• Keywords in italic not as first usage
• Keywords in subscript/superscript
• Keywords in an image filename, ALT tag and/or title
• Keywords in a URL link or associated title tag
• Keywords in a link to a site with PageRank 8 or higher
• Keywords in a link from the homepage or external site
• Use META keywords. Though not necessary for Google, it is useful for other search engines

Here are some useful resources to read up on Search Engine Optimization:

• Google’s tips for webmasters
• PageRank calculations
• Search Engine Optimization articles
• More good Search Engine Optimization articles
• High accessibility is good for SEO
• Google Hacks (ISBN 0596004478)

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Woo hoo! Finally, the Googlebot has come to our site and crawled our pages. If you do a search for “Nev n Dave”, you’ll find we are #1 on Google of 569,000 other links.

Incidentally, we’re also #1 on Yahoo, MSN, A9, Alexa, Vivisimo and AskJeeves
…

That’s pretty amazing!

Ah the GoogleBot. Googlebot is Google’s web-crawling robot. Its job is to go out into the great Internet unknown and collect documents to build a searchable index for the Google search engine. In order for a site to be listed on Google’s homepage and be available for searching, that site must first be indexed by the GoogleBot.

I don’t know what other site operators do, but we tend to putty into the server and tail the access logs quite a bit. Yeah, yeah… it’s pretty sad but can’t help but get a kick whenever we see a “real” user access our sites…

Where is that GoogleBot?