::: All good SEO (Search Engine Optimization) starts with the basics.
++ Google Basics: San Diego, CA, USA / Don Cook / Don's Digital Café

When you sit down at your computer and do a Google search, you're almost instantly presented with a list of results from all over the web. How does Google find web pages matching your query, and determine the order of search results?

In the simplest terms, you could think of searching the web as looking in a very large book with an impressive index telling you exactly where everything is located. When you perform a Google search, their programs check their index to determine the most relevant search results to be returned ("served") to you.

The three key processes in delivering search results to you are 1) crawling, 2) indexing, and 3) serving:

Crawling.

Crawling is the process by which new and updated web pages are added to the Google index.

Google uses a huge set of computers to fetch (or "crawl") billions of pages on the web. The program that does the fetching is called Googlebot (also known as a robot, bot, or spider). Googlebot uses an algorithmic process: Computer programs determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to "fetch" from each site.

Google's crawl process begins with a list of web page URLs, generated from previous crawl processes, and augmented with Sitemap data provided by webmasters. As Googlebot visits each of these websites it detects links on each page and adds them to its list of pages to crawl. New sites, changes to existing sites, and dead links are noted and used to update the Google index.

Google doesn't accept payment to crawl a site more frequently, and we keep the search side of our business separate from our revenue-generating AdWords service.

Note from Raster Master: It is not commonly known, but about 96% of Google's income is generated by their AdWords service.

Indexing.

Google processes each of the pages it crawls in order to compile a massive index of all the words it sees and their location on each page. In addition, Google processes information included in key content tags and attributes, such as Title tags and ALT attributes. Googlebot can process many, but not all, content types. For example, we cannot process the content of some rich media files or dynamic pages.

Serving.

When a user enters a query, the Google machines search the index for matching pages and return the results they believe are the most relevant to the user.

Relevancy is determined by over 200 factors, one of which is the PageRank for a given page. PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In simple terms, each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site's PageRank.

Not all links are equal: Google works hard to improve the user experience by identifying spam links and other practices that negatively impact search results. The best types of links are those that are given based on the quality of your content.

:: Source: [Google, Mountain View, CA, USA]
:: Google Logo Design: [Ruth Kedar, Kedar Designs, Mountain View, CA, USA]
:: Innovation: Understanding the basics of the Google search engine.
:: Available: Now.
:: Cost: $Priceless.

::: The basics of SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
++ Promoting Websites: San Diego, CA, USA / Don's Digital Café

All of our sites have clean XHTML, proper tagging, and proper META information. All of which is essential to helping web crawlers  (robot spiders) find and index our sites properly.

During the first 10 days after the launch of our BETA test site, we were visited by 544 robot spiders (robots). Some new sites get 0 visits. This happened because our site is optimized for robots.

Following are some of the things that we do to ensure that our sites can be optimally crawled and indexed by the major search engines:

• Valid/Clean XHTML: Our sites are produced using completely clean and valid XHTML. This sort of structure helps crawlers easily scan the content on all of our sites. Also, because our sites have a solid underlying structure and are linked together coherently, crawlers will have a simple time moving around all of the pages of all of our sites.
• Embedded RSS:  For our Journals (blogs), the RSS feeds are embedded in the code of all of each and every page. Modern crawlers take these cues and remember to crawl our sites more frequently (as sites with RSS are updated more frequently than static sites).
• Domain Mapping: We use custom domains with all of our sites. Domain Mapping ensures that the squarespace.com domain is completely removed from all of the the code on all of our sites. Crawlers will understand our sites to be indexed properly at our domain's location.
• Clean URLs: All major pages on our sites are presented at distinct URLs that are free from special characters. This formatting indicates to search engines where the primary content on our sites is located, and allows the URLs to be presented within search engines very clearly.
• Clean Titles: All major pages on our sites have titles formatted properly, and we includes relevant text from the page content within our page titles. This structure is optimal for search engine indexing.

At the end of the day, all of these items can contribute to the success of our sites within search engines, and it's important that they're all addressed. However, a site can lack all of the above items, and if it has high quality inbound links, it will always rank higher in modern search engines.

Note from Raster Master: PageRank is calculated by factoring the number of links to our websites, along with the PageRank of each site linking to us (each link counts as a vote). More relevant links to our sites will cause it's PageRank to go up. Every particular site's PageRank is updated by Google in a 1-2 month cycle. A single good link to any of our sites is worth more on Google than hours of trying to tweak our XHTML to make the Google spider like our site. This is why we spend time and money in securing quality links to our sites.

:: Source: [SquareSpace, Manhattan, NY, USA]
:: Image Credit: [Linda Bucklin, Linda's Galleries, New York, NY, USA]
:: Innovation: Simple strategies to get websites noticed.
:: Available: Now.
:: Cost: $Priceless.