Getting listed by Google
Basic techniques - getting listed
Pages need to be built in such a way that Google and other search engines can read them and therefore list them. We’ll stick to Google for now as in the UK it probably accounts for around three quarters of the searches carried out, and anyway most of the techniques will apply equally well to the other search engines.
In order to obtain a listing for your page Google sends out a robot or spider, which looks through the page and then adds it to the list of pages that it will re-visit from time to time to check for changes. The important thing to realize is the this robot doesn’t see the page in the same way that you or I - fancy graphics and flash movies mean nothing to it and neither do excessive chunks of java script and other code. This robot is mainly concerned with words and how they are used and Google will use these findings to rank your page according to relevance to search terms being entered by your potential visitors.
If you want to get highly ranked on Google for search terms used by your customers then the first thing to do is find out if Google is listing your pages at all. A simple way to do this is to visit Google in a web browser at:
Type in “cache:” followed by your web site name, e.g. “cache:www.yoursite.co.uk”.
If all is well and your site is listed, this will show you the page that is listed, together with a message from Google which will tell you the last time the robot visited.
“site:www.yoursite.co.uk” will show you a list of all the pages that are currently listed by Google.
If nothing is returned from the cache search, then it’s time for you to get things moving and make sure you get your site listed. The most effective way to do this is to have a link to your site from another web site which is already in Google’s listings. Next time the robot visits this site it will follow the link to your page and read the content.
Another way is to visit Google and request a visit, although this technique is not always successful.
