You can't buy importance
Recently I spoke to a friend and winemaker who was quoted $12K for lifting the ranking in search engines for their website. Then I sat next to a man on a plane who's daughter-in-law works for a firm that guarantees to optimise sites for search engines. To both, I expressed alarm. This post is for them.
First of all, there is only one search engine you really need to care about now: Google. Like the older engines, Google still crawls the web cataloguing URLs and indexing text. But in addition, Google picks up on the pages to which you are linking, presuming that your link is a vote of recommendation. Conversely, your page's importance index, its PageRank is based on a formula that counts the links to it weighted by the importance of the referrers. The best way to raise a page's importance is to get it linked from many other pages, including those that also happen to be important.
But there is a whole industry around search engine optimisation. Avoid unscrupulous schemes that promise to manipulate your PageRank.
Google will find your pages without you doing anything at all. An actual search is done by text matching, so if your content is well-constructed and linkable, which will help your popularity, you are done. Content management systems (eg. weblogs, wikis, platforms like Joomla!) give you a leg up. If you use Google Analytics on your pages, as I do, it catches links in real-time for Google, so your PageRank is more accurate. [Update:] This NY Times article (June, 2007) provides a superb insight into the workings of Google Search.
So just concentrate on doing your best at communicating and let your PageRank sort itself out.
First of all, there is only one search engine you really need to care about now: Google. Like the older engines, Google still crawls the web cataloguing URLs and indexing text. But in addition, Google picks up on the pages to which you are linking, presuming that your link is a vote of recommendation. Conversely, your page's importance index, its PageRank is based on a formula that counts the links to it weighted by the importance of the referrers. The best way to raise a page's importance is to get it linked from many other pages, including those that also happen to be important.
But there is a whole industry around search engine optimisation. Avoid unscrupulous schemes that promise to manipulate your PageRank.
Google will find your pages without you doing anything at all. An actual search is done by text matching, so if your content is well-constructed and linkable, which will help your popularity, you are done. Content management systems (eg. weblogs, wikis, platforms like Joomla!) give you a leg up. If you use Google Analytics on your pages, as I do, it catches links in real-time for Google, so your PageRank is more accurate. [Update:] This NY Times article (June, 2007) provides a superb insight into the workings of Google Search.
So just concentrate on doing your best at communicating and let your PageRank sort itself out.
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