The Google Dance is simply that the predetermination of when the actual update will commence. What really happens is Google sends out spiders to crawl the Internet, usually done to DNS (Domain Name Servers), upon spidering all of the available tables it begins to go through each individual site and updates the content on to Google.com. Thus if you watch your rank on the Google Toolbar, you can tell when your overall page rank has changed.
Understanding SEO and what is necessary to improve your overall ranking. Webmasters have been looking for ways to increase the odds of guessing when the next spidering would commence. There are various versions and servers that go out and crawl thousands of servers at a time, it takes time to relay and decipher this information back to the web server that Google.com pulls its information from.
Some vendors have created programs that actually go out to the data centers themselves to find out approximately when the last index was kicked off. Depending on the information returned from the trace the exact time and date are pinpointed. Is there really that much of an advantage to doing it this way? It depends, if you have a vital update that you want to optimize your site, you may want to know when the last time Google visited your site for content to keep information fresh and relevant.
There are many data centers that Google uses to spider across the world. Each center has a specific region it covers and all the information is gathered in aggregate and returned back to populate Google.com. With this many data centers the chances for continuous indexing is good, but not guaranteed.
LSI is a way to take a computer algorithm and allow it to understand what the web page is about the same way a human reading the page would.
Let me give you two sample paragraphs.
If you are looking for great dog training advice, you've come to the right place. We have all the best "dog training" resources on the Internet. It doesn't matter what type of dog training you need, we've got it here at. We'll make dog training a painless process.
Now consider this:
If you're looking for great dog training advice, you've come to the right place. Whether you're housebreaking a new puppy or you want to get advanced with agility training, we've got the resources you need. Give us a few weeks, and your dog will be sitting, staying, and coming on command, and you'll never again need to worry about what kind of trouble your dog is getting itself into when you're not there. Obedience issues will be a thing of the past.
You tell me, which paragraph is more relevant to you, the human reader, if you're interested in dog training? Paragraph number two, right? And as a person looking for information, you'd find more relevant information if the second paragraph ranked higher in the search engines.
And that is exactly what latent semantic indexing is. It allows search engines to look at a page and understand the topic and who is covering it and discussing it better without having to hire a human to read and rank every page manually.
While there are programs out there to help you develop your "theme" properly and on how to build content silos and a bunch of other stuff, you don't actually need to know any of that. Remember, the whole point of LSI is to place the most relevant websites at the top of the search, not just the ones with the optimal keyword density. It's supposed to be more "human-like" in its ability to understand a page. So here's what you do. Make sure the pages of your website are written by somebody who knows the subject well (I'd recommend using a human if you've got one available). If you're a subject matter expert, your content will be written in the optimal format for latent semantic indexing without even thinking about it.
If you are into online advertising, what do you think is the best way to capture the attention of internet users? What will make them take a look at your ad banners and click on it? I would say that it is the banner advertising design and its textual content, too. Perhaps, many of you would say that the design matters more than anything else. Yes it does but that is not really everything. The words that you also put into it also matter. You need to use catchy words that will make people take action. Advertising banners on websites is one very effective way of promoting a product or a service on the net.
And I must also say that this is a cost effective way of having advertisements on the net. Well, there are just too many distractions on every web page these days that it has become quite a challenge for online banner advertisements to get noticed. Of course, the primary thing that you need to pay attention to is the banner advertising design. A striking design would most often catch internet surfers' attention. This is actually very essential these days. Most websites have too many elements so if your advertisement is something close to ordinary; don't expect it to be noticed easily.
Online advertisers are scrambling to get the attention of internet users and you must be up for the competition. There are specific guidelines that you have to take note of when designing an online advertisement. You don't simply grab the mouse and insert whatever designs that will strike your fancy. You may want to see banner advertising examples first. See what makes them catchy and effective. Then, you can adapt the same principles when you get into your own banner advertising design. You need not copy other advertisers' style; try to create a better version. In order to achieve an effective business promotion, a good banner advertising design can really be a great help.
If you noticed, animated banner ads are the common ones. This style is really effective and catchy. But I must tell you; this can be a bit expensive if you will buy those expensive graphics software programs. If you are a bit naive about these things, you will really spend so much money when all the while you can actually settle for a cheaper alternative but still achieve the same results. Do a thorough research on particular tools that you can use to make a competitive banner advertising design. You can actually make use of your own creativity in personally designing your own animated ad.
You don't really need those expensive programs. Outsourcing a web designer to do banner advertising design can also be expensive. If you have enough budget, I would not discourage you from getting the services of a professional web designer. If you get a good designer, that would give a big boost to your online ads. But if you don't have much money to burn, then you can read resources online on how to go about advertising banners on websites and study how you can make a simple yet attractive banner. It can actually be a fun activity especially when you are sincerely interested in learning this craft.
how search engines work, specifically Google.
Why Google? They own the largest part of all search engine advertising on the internet, anywhere from 50% to 85% depending on who you want to believe. At 50% though, I am going to focus on them if I am going to put a lot of time and energy to SEO.
Search engines like Google have a job to do. They want (and need) to optimize our search results. If we are typing in keywords to find information about Martin guitars, we don't really want to see web site after web site in our listings pertaining to Wilson baseball bats. We have an expectation of getting search results closely related to what we are searching for.
Search engines also want to create a level playing field for those competing for top spots within each specific search phrase.
Google is basically performing several tasks by performing queries over the internet for fresh content, indexing all of the important words, comparing results of all of their indexed information, and creating results that justify what you and I are looking for if we do a search.
Here is a basic understanding of what they do.
Within Google, there is a distributed network which contains thousands of your average type computers. These computers are all connected to each other with what is called parallel processing. An analogy of this would be to visualize a chain in how each link connects to each other. These computers work independently as well as simultaneously with each other. The speed is incredible when doing data processing. The process or program that runs on these computers is called Googlebot.
There are multiple steps that occur with Google but I am going to focus on Googlebot. The process Googlebot is always working to obtain fresh content. They do "not" go to each web site like you would think but rather they work like a web browser. They send out queries to web servers requesting pages.
Usually, they do this through the add URL form which for Google is at http://google.com/addurl.html. If you have created a web site, this is where you would submit your domain name. When they do come and "crawl" your site, they will also index all of your links. They place these into another index file and send out queries through them later.
Note: When you submit your site like this, it can take over a month at least before Google gets to crawling it. There is a way around this which we will talk about later!
Getting back to the web servers, note that typically every domain name is connected to a server. These are the places in which you are paying for their hosting services.
Again, if a web server gets queried and sends the fresh content pages to those thousands of computers, Googlebot will then place the links that they find and place them into a queue. At a later time, they will then send queries to the servers "those" links are pointing to and "grab" the content from "those" pages. This process goes on and on forever!
This all occurs very quickly. While this is all going on, Googlebot also ensures that there are no duplicate links or content so that they do not waste time and re-index a web site. During all of this, there is a process where Googlebot places sites that need revisited into another cue (visit the site soon) URL's. You actually determine the date in which they come back by how often your web sites' content changes. The more often it changes, the more often the site will be crawled.
Note: What I just explained is very important for SEO. You need to be consistent with your changes. You do "not" want Google to crawl your site if they are expecting fresh content. If they do, it will be later and later before they come back and visit your site.
This process where they come back to your site based on content changes are called "fresh crawls".
They are also going to be doing from time to time what is called a "hard crawl". This occurs infrequently throughout the course of a year. During hard crawls, they are sweeping the internet for "everything". They then make comparisons and determine your web sites positions in their search rankings for specific word phrases as well as every other web site on the internet.
Note: I want to point out that when they crawl your site, they are only crawling the page or "pages" you have made changes to. They are not indexing your whole site.
Had enough? It is not important to know the above but there are people like me that like to understand in some way the bigger picture. Knowing this can help though when you are doing SEO!
There are various reasons why or why you should not start an SEO campaign for your business website. I will break this down a bit.
The negatives:
1.) Time! This is a big determining factor when beginning an SEO campaign. I believe most people who actually initiate an SEO campaign do not have a true realization of how long it could take. Most have false expectations which are probably due to some of the stuff you see on the internet. I often hear about claims that you can have your web site in top positions within days or weeks. If any of these claims were true, I would be a rich man and so would everyone else.
Warning! If you are looking at hiring an SEO expert to do your SEO, be careful of the SEO scams that are out there. They might claim to have top positions for some keywords yet if you investigate, you will find that they are easily obtained positions which do "not" get any traffic. Hiring a genuine SEO expert will cost you a lot of money for a legitimate keyword phrase.
Look at it this way...if there were some kind of tool or software program that would get you to the top quickly, everyone would have it!
Getting a particular keyword phrase to the top of Google's search engine rankings can take an incredible amount of time. As a matter of fact, the more financial gain a particular keyword phrase would command, the tougher the competition will be. In respect to time, you are looking at probably not days or months but possibly years! Just so I do not scare you away, there are keywords and keyword phrases that you can obtain with much less traffic that you could acquire in weeks.
As noted, I am probably scaring you a little bit. There is a way to get traffic much sooner than months or years which I will go over at a later time. I am generally speaking now about your higher traffic type keywords. I will say there are factors that weigh into the process for each individual keyword phrase you decide to compete for. Again, I will get into that later in this series. Most people typically "give up" or do not want to start because of the time factor. In today's society, most people are looking for quick gratification.
2.) Work Involved! An SEO campaign, again depending on the keywords, takes a "LOT" of work. Most of it involves writing which by itself, keeps the majority of people looking for other means to get traffic to their web site.
To me, there are only these two negatives but they are enough to stop people in their tracks.
The positives:
1.) Financially rewarding! If you embark on an SEO campaign and succeed, to me (depending on your keywords) you have made the big time. You "will" have a successful money making business working from home in your pajamas. As a matter of fact, once you have a good income stream built up, there are things you can do to deliver even more traffic to your site and increase your earnings.
2.) Time! The one negative I briefly mentioned now becomes a positive. Once you have your web site to the top, keeping it there is not as difficult as getting it there. If you are making good money sitting around in your underwear, it sure beats the 40 plus hours a week you put into your day job, not to mention the time it takes to get ready for work and drive back and forth every day.
3.) Not bugging family and friends. Just about all home based businesses want you to hit your friends and family up to sell your product or bring "them" into your downline by "signing up". This is one of those reasons why people fail so often in network marketing. Not many people who get involved with a business opportunity have the four year college degree in sales or marketing to successfully draw or talk others into it.
4.) Inexpensive. Doesn't cost much at all to do SEO.
If you are using the internet for your business opportunity or home based business, SEO or search engine optimization is just one way of getting traffic to your web site. I will begin by explaining just what it is and how it works.
Search Engine Optimization or SEO
When you are looking for something you are interested in on the internet, typically we all start out by typing words into a search function that might by Yahoo, Google, MSN, or one of many other hundreds of places.
These places where you begin your search are referred to as "search engines". If you are looking (for example), used cars...you would probably type in those two words "used cars". You then get a listing in order of various web sites related to your search. If you are looking for information on the topic of "removing gasoline from your cloths", you might start a search for related topics by typing in a search term "removing gas from clothing". I use that example because I had to do it recently. Again, a list of related web sites show up on your computer screen with the top "search results".
Often, you will start searching the internet for whatever you are interested in by using specific word phrases which in SEO are called "keywords". You also will know from your own experience that often you end up "narrowing" your search by changing your word phrases "keywords" to something that will "hone" down what you are looking for.
If you are doing SEO, you would want people that are searching for what you have to offer to land on your web site. You do this by getting your web site to the top of the search results for related word searches or "keywords". For example, if you are selling gems or crystals, you would want your web site to come up first for people looking for those types of things..."gems" or "crystals". I could go on with this but hopefully you get the point.
For some specific word phrases, you might get dozens of people arriving at your web site which could relate to possible sales...some word phrases, you could literally get hundreds or thousands of possible sales "every day"!
It is in this way that if you are working on search engine optimization, getting your web site to a top position where many people would see it and land on it, could be financially very rewarding.
Needless to say, getting top positions for high "quality" word phrases (again "keywords) are difficult to get. Because of the financial reward of having a web site in top related word results, competition if very high.
Most people when they start an SEO campaign focus on Google. Depending on who or where or what time of day you read it from, Google commands from 50% to 85% of all search engine advertising. In other words, getting your web site to the top of the SERPs (search engine ranking pages) for Google will bring you much more traffic than say MSN which only has 1% to 2% of search engine advertising on the internet.
