Getting Indexed by Search Engines

If you read a lot of articles, guides, tutorials and any other materials about basic search engine optimization, getting indexed to search engines is the most important part of SEO after you've created your site and optimized its content.

What will you do after you've uploaded those web pages, optimized the content as well as your meta tags? Getting listed in SERPs of course! Here's what learned about indexing web pages:

Submitting to Search Engines

Many would say that submitting your home page to search engines is just a waste of time. Well, if your trying to submit on all those search engines then you really are just wasting your time. You can still do this method but my advice is to submit only to what webmasters' call “The Big Three”, namely Google, Yahoo and Bing (former MSN).

You can still get your web pages indexed without having to do this method. There are other ways, which I think are much better, that can help you get your site indexed and faster.

The Power of Social Bookmarking

If you haven't heard if Digg.com or StumbleUpon.com then you're way behind in search engine optimization. These are samples of a social bookmarking sites which is similar to the ordinary bookmark tool we have in our web browsers' menu bar. The difference between the ordinary bookmarking and with social bookmarking are:

• you can access your bookmarks on any computer you use just by registering an account;
• and share your bookmarked sites/links with other people.

Why Should I Submit to Social Bookmarking Sites?

Here are the reasons I've learned why we should submit to social bookmarking sites:

1. For fast indexing - high traffic social bookmarking sites are more frequently visited by search engine spiders. If you submit your site, the higher the chance you have getting indexed.
2. For traffic - people love interesting topics, important news, humor and tutorials.
3. Increase more traffic - posts on Digg, and other social bookmarking sites, also appears in SERP, giving you an even higher chance of web visibility!

Social Networking Sites

Do you like Facebook or Twitter? These are social networking sites where you can add links to a post. Isn't that great?! Now the key to the successful use of social networking sites is you got to have lots of friends; mingle with other members, join different groups, share your profile and be active, don't just login to your account to post a link. This link building technique is very helpful if you use it properly.

I find social bookmarking and networking as a part of link building techniques that you can both use for work and have fun at the same time. Because you get to meet other webmasters doing link building of their own, you can exchange SEO tips and secrets, and the normal internet users you can interact with while doing work. And best of all you can even earn extra income by offering link building services to companies/sites that needs help with their search engine rankings.

Sitemaps

There are two types of sitemaps we can use, the XML and HTML sitemaps.

XML Sitemap - This sitemap is used to inform search engines of pages that are available for crawling in a website.

HTML Sitemap - This sitemap is for your visitors. It is used as a guide/navigation for visitors who are looking for a specific page, product or service you might be offering.

Now, you'll find these search engine optimization techniques quite easy to learn and do. Submitting your site or blog to the big three search engines can take you at least five minutes to do, social bookmarking and networking can be time consuming but it's all worth it, and submitting sitemaps to search engines is a must-do if you want to get all your web pages indexed.

Nofollow and Noindex on Robots.txt and Meta Tags

I know a lot of you are wondering what's the difference between the “nofollow” and “noindex” in the robots.txt file and the ones declared on the meta tags. Some search engine optimization specialists claims that there's no difference while others believe that one method is less valuable than the other.

You can ask it out on several webmaster/SEO forums, but you'll just get mixed responses. In here, I will give you the REAL answer! According to Eric Enge's interview with Google's software engineer Matt Cutts way back in 2007, there are differences in using NoIndex, NoFollow, and Robots.txt.

In The Robots.txt File

Even if you restrict Google's spider from indexing certain pages of your website, they can still accumulate page rank. For example, if you disallow the crawling of your “About Us” page yet your homepage links to it, PR juice is still passed on.

In addition, websites that disallow crawling can still accumulate page rank and be visible in search results. Why? If another website links to it, PR juice will be passed on. Google can sometimes use the information of a website submitted to ODP (also known as DMOZ) in order to display it on their results page, or when another website links to it.

In The Meta Tag

Let's understand what Nofollow and Noindex really means.

The Nofollow is usually used on outgoing links, when declared in the meta tag, it means “do not follow all links on this page.” With this, you are also telling the spider not to pass PR juice. However, the nofollow on the meta tag also applies to your links that points to the other pages of your website. This also means that you are depriving the flow of PR juice to some of your pages.

On the other hand, the Noindex means, “do not index this page.” Pages with noindex can still accumulate page rank if a there's a dofollow link pointing to that page.

Dofollow is the opposite of Nofollow - a link with no “nofollow” attribute assigned means it's a dofollow link. A term used by webmasters and SEO experts.

To sum it all up:

• NoFollow means you're telling the search engine spider not to follow a link and also not to pass PR juice to that link.
• NoIndex means you're telling the search engine spider not to index your website or webpage and not to show it on SERP.
• The website or webpage in a Nofollow link can still gain PR if another site links to it without the nofollow attribute.
• Pages with the Noindex tag can still gain PR if another site links to it without a nofollow attribute.
• Pages with the Noindex tag can still be visible on SEPR using the information collected from ODP (DMOZ) or when another website links to it using a dofollow link.
• Nofollow attribute on the meta tag of a webpage, applies to all the links on that page.
• Nofollow attribute on any link applies only to that link.

So whether you use the Robots.txt or the Meta Tag, the results are still the same. The reason why Robots.txt is mostly used is because “it is the fundamental method of putting up an electronic no trespassing sign that people have used since 1996,” and it's much easier to declare which pages of your website not to crawl instead of placing the NoIndex code manually on individual pages' meta tags.

Commonly, SEO services do provide complete analysis of a website as well as recommendations. So whenever you are looking for a good search engine optimization service, never forget to ask for a website analysis first, don't just jump in and hire someone who said he can do SEO for your website.

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

As the Google Webmasters' Guide tells us:

SEO is an acronym for "search engine optimization" or "search engine optimizer."

Basically, SEO is the method or strategy used by webmasters to improve their website's ranking in Search Engines (SE) in order to increase traffic and sales. Basic things such as review of web content and structure, are a part of SEO.

It's in the early 1990's where website owners began to realize that having their sites highly visible in SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) brings them more traffic and sales.

People who began to notice this have created techniques to manipulate Search Engines. Spamming and hacking Search Engines' algorithm were the main idea at that time, though it was highly discouraged by Search Engine Owners.

Due to this, the banning and decreasing of website rankings began. The people who did the aforementioned unethical way to increase their rankings realized that by following Search Engine's guidelines, they can also come up with satisfactory results, all that they need is patience.

Search Engines were made to provide quality information to its users, that's why they fight back and bite hard those webmasters who practices SEO the wrong way.

Life of a Search Engine Optimizer

As what most people would expect, we, search engine optimizers or SEO specialists live the same life on the net. You see us searching through the web for hours reading articles, joining all sorts of forums, interacting with other SEOs and even spot us on some social networking sites, but what you don’t see is that these things are a part of our job. It‘s not even half of what we do inside the office!

We may seem so similar with each other, but what really makes a search engine optimizer different from another is through the methods and strategies we use, our years of experience, and our aggressiveness when it comes to pushing our limits. Some find it easy to learn and understand what Search Engine Optimization is, everyone can be a SEO, but not everyone can be a good SEO.

Personally, I learned SEO by force and in a hard way. It was year 2007, I was a fresh grad looking for a job as a programmer. Due to many failed 3-hour programming exams (and one failed web design exam) on several companies, I ended up applying for a SEO specialist position in a small company in Pasig, where they offered me training. I was depressed and really frustrated at that time, so I took the job.

My SEO trainer made me do a lot of stuff on the internet that I never knew, like for example, blogging. Yeah I know, creating blogs is very simple; I was a shy introvert who spent most of her time locked up at home watching TV and playing Ragnarok Online, how am I supposed to know?! I was even embarrassed when my trainer instructed me to create a Gmail account and I didn’t even know where to start.

It was a very rocky road for me becoming a SEO specialist, but the moment I came to realize that this field kinda suits me, I held tight on it and instead of remaining a simple backup link builder for the big shots, I worked my way on top and became a real SEO specialist.

Let me give you an idea of what kind of life a search engine optimizer lives:

The Noob

The newbie search engine optimizer always, with a bit of fear, follows search engine guidelines, read lots of articles and join webmaster forums. It is a must for a newbie to always have his beginner’s manual whether it’s a hard or soft copy, and you may sometimes caught a newbie peeking at his fellow noob’s techniques. A newbie never spam, unless told so or forced to, and always mistakenly use his own personal info instead of using a dummy account.

The Experienced SEO Lad

By this time, this search engine optimizer has already realized that it’s much safer for him to use a dummy account. An experienced SEO has his own set of techniques and strategies, still read lots of articles, experiments on his new found skill, and definitely have his own blog. On-page optimization may still be at a learning curve, but improving, or rather, must improve.

The Somewhat Arrogant SEO

Now, this type of search engine optimizer is easy to spot. What matters is that if the arrogant SEO can prove his skills or not. The arrogant yet not so great SEO is more of a chatterbox than showing his skills, mostly caught by unprofessional writing of proposals and website analysis; or worse, can’t even write a decent proposal; and often caught by his superiors copy-pasting previous reports. On the other hand, the arrogant but skillful SEO may boast a few times but can actually deliver the goods.

The Half-Empty and Half-Full SEO

By now you are wondering, what I am taking about half-empty and half-full, I’ll explain it to you.

• There are search engine optimizers that do very well in link building, but slowly lacking on-page optimization skills;
• There are some who specializes in gathering fresh info on how to get more links, rather than how to do them;
• There are those who are more technical than others who handles on-page optimization the best, but slow on filling his quota of building links;
• and don’t forget, there are those that can part great knowledge, give excellent advice, suggest the best ideas or recommend the perfect plan, but still a junior or newbie optimizer working their way on top.

Beyond the learned skills and developed strategies, a search engine optimizer still continues to learn new ways on how to improve a website’s rank. It’s a continues learning process that gets heavy with responsibilities depending on how gradual or drastic are the changes on the web. So don’t be upset when we sometimes can’t make it to your birthday party or wedding, because the continuance of our search for knowledge is already a part of our lives the moment we became real SEOs.