When it comes to search engine marketing and optimization, let’s face it — it’s all about Google. That’s great though, especially providing the number of ways in which you can promote your web site in Google’s search results. For many though, the entire process from start to finish is one filled with myths, ideas and stories tend to be misleading. Today we’ll discuss the process of getting a page indexed in Google, from the initial spidering and retrieval of content through the actual use of the page in search engine results pages.
GoogleBot will first come to your page when they know about it. While you can use a Google Sitemaps XML file or even submit your URL directly to Google to tell them about your page, it’s recommended that you develop an inbound link to the page from another page. Ideally, the page where the backlinks exists should be a page that is frequently indexed and spidered by Google, so as to decrease the waiting period.
Matt Cutts, a well known Google engineer has a great video, appropriately on Google Videos, that discusses how Google views pages as they spider them.
From this video you’re able to learn visually precisely how GoogleBot reacts to various pages. More importantly though, we’re able to understand the dates associated with our listings.
Next, Google needs to begin indexing your content for the purpose of providing results. While we do not know with certainty exactly what Google will rank a page based on — we have been told many times that there are more than 200 elements that all factor in to the actual ranking criteria.
Using that criterion of factors involving both relevance and importance, we know that Google will then release your pages into their search results index.
The most interesting thing to remember is that Google will come through your page and retrieve it twice before posting it to the search results. This also helps us to understand the time factors involved.
In the end, you want to spend your time working on inbound links and tweaking the on page contents of your pages. These two factors will be the major players in increasing your traffic from search results.
Sujan Patel is Director of Search at Single Grain, which specializes in Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing
