by Aaron West

In the past year or so, we've seen a new trend when it comes to search engines. Many of the older engines have decreased in popularity and traffic, while newcomers such as Google, Direct Hit, Ask Jeeves and Fast Search have skyrocketed near the top.

Why the big shakeup?

These newer engines bring newer technologies, better ways of indexing pages, more relevant results, faster searches, and let's face it, a 'cooler' look and feel. A few years ago a common search on a popular engine would almost always return a few irrelevant links, and more often than not a few dead links as well.

Google is definitely the champion of these newcomers and, in my opinion, the best. People go to Google to find good, relevant content, and more often than not the first listing for the search query is exactly what the seeker was looking for. This, along with some deals with other, larger, search engines, has placed Google at the very top, and has made promotion a much easier task for webmasters.

In addition to being the most popular engine among Web searchers, Google also boasts the largest index on the Web. The Google index comprises more than 1 billion URLs and that number appears to be climbing fast.

How does Google do it?

Google gives relevant results for two reasons:

1. Google has one of the greatest algorithms out there. They are superior to all engines when it comes to determining the topic of a page, and by indexing all the words. This is why Google returns great results for obscure searches. Try searching for your name or that of someone you know as an example.

2. Google ranks based on link popularity. Their logic is, if a lot of people link to a site, it's probably good. That makes perfectly good sense, and it seems to reflect in their rankings. For example, when a search is performed for the string 'Atlanta Braves', the first result is www.atlantabraves.com, the remaining listings come from Excite, Yahoo, Fastball and more. These are all great results. Now if a search query is 'Atlanta Braves World Series Champions', the first result is also www.atlantabraves.com, with the other results being about the 1995 World Series. Obviously a lot of sites link to the Official Braves site, which is why it shows up so often.

First Thing's First

To get a good listing in Google, you need to first focus on the content of your site. Make sure the content is of high quality and useful to your visitors. Not only will this help getting a good ranking, but with good content it is likely that you will get a lot of links to your site.

Getting Links

Google ranks not only by the number of incoming links to your site, but also by the quality of those links. For example, if a site is linking to you that has 1,000 links to it, your link popularity ranking will be higher than if the site had no links to it. For this reason, it's a good idea to try to find high traffic sites to link to yours. You might find some of our articles in our Reciprocal Links section useful.

Getting listed in Directories such as Yahoo, the Open Directory Project and Looksmart is also recommended. These directory listings are all incoming links from sites with high traffic, and will improve your link popularity ranking considerably.

Of course, you'll want Google to know which sites are linking to yours. A good way to do this is to go through your Referral logs and compile a list of URLs, from the most referrals on down, and submit those pages to Google. You can do this manually, but I recommend using a tool such as Dumptruck to do the work for you. Google will crawl these pages, find the links to your site, and increase your link popularity ranking.

Submitting to Google

This is the easy part. Simply go to the Submit page (click here) and enter the full URL to the page you wish to submit. It is definitely a good idea to submit your home (index) page, but you might want to also submit your site map page, or perhaps compile a list of links to pages within your site. When Google receives this, they will 'deep crawl' your site, and there is a good chance that most, if not all, of your pages will be indexed in the engine.

After you submit, check your referral logs for Googlebot, and the amount of requests. If this number is high, Google is doing a deep crawl of your site and you probably shouldn't submit any pages unless they are new.

Google Directory

You can also be listed in Google by getting a listing in the Open Directory Project. This data is used to populate the Google Directory. Don't expect a tremendous amount of traffic from the Google Directory, but it will help increase your Popularity ranking from Google, as well as give you traffic from many other engines (Lycos, AltaVista, Netscape, AOL, etc.).

More Google Traffic

When you get into Google, you will also get into other popular sites that use Google data. The most notable of these is Yahoo, which just recently abandoned Inktomi and began using Google for results not found in the Yahoo Directory. Since Yahoo is the highest traffic site on the Web, there is a good chance of you getting a significant amount of traffic through Google results. It is recommended that you still try to get listed in the Yahoo Directory, but Google can bring plenty of supplemental traffic if not more traffic than Yahoo.

Google data is also used by other popular destinations such as Netscape Search, Nextel Online, Business.com, Hotrate, Planetclick and plenty more. Getting listed in Google could also bring a steady flow of traffic from these sites.

Get In

Google gives webmasters exactly what they have been looking for, a search engine to generate targeted traffic with little effort, other than keeping the quality of the content in tiptop shape. With Google's nearly exponential increase in popularity, their ever expanding partner list, and their award-winning search algorithm, it is a must to get in. In my opinion, getting into Google should be the primary focus when it comes to promoting one's site on search engines. Google has been on the top of the referral list for every site I've worked on for many months. As they have gained in popularity and more people have started linking to me, those referrals have increased steadily.