Google's Thought Process - How It Finds And Ranks Your Website
Getting your website high in the search rankings can be the difference between a trickle of traffic and a flood of revenue. In this article, we'll learn how to ensure Google finds your website and includes all your pages in its search index.
Spiders. All search engines use programs called spiders to collect information from websites on the internet. These spiders scan the text on each webpage and follow the links to other websites. All the information is then stored in an index. Google will find your website in one of four ways: it is either redirected from an existing webpage, notified through the submission of a sitemap or an addurl function, and lastly, by following a link from another website. The spider will search a webpage and follow the internal links to other pages on your site, even at the time or in the future. Don't be concerned if your whole site isn't indexed right away; the spiders will come back for more!
New websites can generally expect to be crawled by spiders within a month, and usually appear in the search results within 4 to 6 weeks. Of the four methods of attracting the spiders, submitting a sitemap generally yields the fastest results. A sitemap is a table of contents that you publish on your site. It gives spiders a roadmap to navigate your site. Creating a sitemap is easy; just visit xml-sitemaps.com and enter your domain name. It will scan your site and create the sitemap for you.
Your next step is to submit the sitemap to the two following locations:
Google Webmaster Tools
Yahoo Site Explorer
By following these steps you'll ensure that the search engines find, scan and index your sites appropriately. With proper search engine optimization, you then begin working to improve your rankings.
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