|
Thursday, September 22, 2005
Ng: Topping search engine ranking
By Wilson Ng
Wired Desktop
What is the purpose of maintaining a website? Normally, businesses maintain a website to promote their business. Nobody wants to be a webmaster of a website where there are no visitors. It’s similar to opening a store — the more people who visit, the better. Even if it is a personal website, or a personal blog page, you want more people to visit. That, after all, is the promise of the Internet. With almost a billion people now surfing daily, can’t we get at least a hundred to visit us daily?
So knowing about how to design a website — making it “sticky” so people would want to return — is important. Of course, one way to get more visitors to visit is to make sure that all your company documents and correspondence carry your website address, and you advertise or let as many people know as much as possible. The other is to make sure that people want to come back, this can be done by making sure your website is interesting and up-to-date.
Who wants to go to a website that has remained unchanged after your first visit a quarter or a day ago? That is the reason that merchants change their shop windows every few weeks, or every so often. You want to inform people that you always have something new to offer.
The other way to build up traffic is through search engines. Evidently, over a hundred million engine searches are made every day; some say even more than two hundred million. Being listed in search engines is akin to advertising in the yellow pages.
It’s a way of ensuring that when people search the directory, they will find you. If you are a computer company in Manila, you want to make sure that when people go to the Manila yellow pages directory, and search for computers, you would come out prominently.
Currently, there are over a thousand search engines. But it is estimated only three search engines handle over 90 percent of all searches - and that is Google, Yahoo and MSN Search. So you want to know how to be prominent there, especially Google, which is currently the most popular search engine.
There are two ways to appear prominently in Google: First, is to get prominent ranking and second, is through putting an advertisement there. When you do a search on Google on, let us say, computers, two sets of answers will appear. On the left are the websites that Google feels is most relevant to your search. This space is not paid, but Google ranks you based on the relevance of your website to the person’s search. On the right side of the screen, one finds websites that deals with the search topic, but these are in the form of advertisements.
Google allows you to advertise your website through www.google.com/adwords. In here, you choose how you plan to advertise, what kind of keywords you want to bid on (how much you are willing to pay to be clicked) and other features.
It goes without saying that if you are willing to pay a lot of money, you will be getting a high ranking among advertisers and your site will come out more often. However, you have to pay every time you come out, or every time your link is clicked. This can get very expensive.
If you want free advertising, then what you need to do is to try to work out your site so that it will come out prominently in the ranking. This is a better option because of two things: one, most people will not click on the advertisements, but rather on the results of the search; two, it does not cost anything. And, of course, it is important to be ahead in the search, since most people (even with thousands of results) will most likely check the first 20 or 30 results only.
Being ahead of the ranking would result in enormous new traffic to your site. Needless to say, there are thousands of debates and thousands of offers in the Internet on how to do this. All you have to do is to a search on SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization, and you will find thousands of theories and thousands of offers on how to come out ahead on Google and other searches.
The way google does this is complex, but there is one thing that we know for a fact - Google, and now increasingly almost every search engine, scour all web sites and rank them. The higher your ranking, the more chances you have in getting into the search.
This is what Google founders Larry Page and Sergei Bren learned while studying in Stanford. If you have good academic material, you would be cited in many academic journals, which is something like a reference. The more famous and authoritative your work is, the more writers will quote you. They applied this principle in the Internet world, thus websites and pages are ranked depending on how many sites connect to them.
Optimizing ranking is quite complex but, at least, you know the most important one. Try to make your websites well researched and authoritative and people, who think your website is cool or relevant, will link to you. This will definitely increase your ranking.
(September 22, 2005 issue)
Write letter to the editor. Click here.
Join the Sun.Star message board. Click here. |
|
[return to top]
[home]
[network page]
|
LOCAL NEWS
BUSINESS
OPINION
SPORTS
LIFESTYLE
FEATURE
SUPERBALITA
WEEKEND
|
