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Crawlers, spiders, and robots - Databases - Quality considerations

noreply@blogger.com (aju) — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 15:16:00 +0000

Crawlers, spiders, and robots

The query interface and search results pages truly are the only parts of a search engine that the user ever sees. Every other part of the search engine is behind the scenes, out of view of the people who use it every day. That doesn’t mean it’s not important, however. In fact, what’s in the back end is the most important part of the search engine, and it’s what determines how you show up in the front end.

If you’ve spent any time on the Internet, you may have heard a little about spiders, crawlers, and robots. These little creatures are programs that literally crawl around the Web, cataloging data so that it can be searched. In the most basic sense, all three programs — crawlers, spiders, and robots — are essentially the same. They all collect information about each and every web URL.

This information is then cataloged according to the URL at which they’re located and are stored in a database. Then, when a user uses a search engine to locate something on the Web, the references in the database are searched and the search results are returned.

Databases

Every search engine contains or is connected to a system of databases where data about each URL on the Web (collected by crawlers, spiders, or robots) is stored. These databases are massive storage areas that contain multiple data points about each URL.

The data might be arranged in any number of different ways and is ranked according to a method of ranking and retrieval that is usually proprietary to the company that owns the search engine.

You’ve probably heard of the method of ranking called PageRank (for Google) or even the more generic term quality scoring. This ranking or scoring determination is one of the most complex and secretive parts of SEO. How those scores are derived, exactly, is a closely guarded secret, in part because search engine companies change the weight of the elements used to arrive at the score according to usage patterns on the Web.

The idea is to score pages based on the quality that site visitors derive from the page, not on how well web site designers can manipulate the elements that make up the quality score. For example, there was a time when the keywords that were used to rank a page were one of the most important factors in obtaining a high-quality score.

That’s no longer the case. Don’t get me wrong. Keywords are still vitally important in web page ranking. However, they’re just one of dozens of elements that are taken into consideration, which is why a large portion of Part II of this book is dedicated to using keywords to your advantage. They do have value; and more important, keywords can cause damage if not used properly — but we’ll get to that.

Quality considerations

When you’re considering the importance of databases, and by extension page quality measurements, in the mix of SEO, it might be helpful to equate it to something more familiar — customer service. What comprises good customer service is not any one thing. It’s a conglomeration of different factors — greetings, attitude, helpfulness, and knowledge, just toname a few — that come together to create a pleasant experience. A web page quality score is the same.

The difference with a quality score is that you’re measuring elements of design, rather than actions of an individual. For example, some of the elements that are known to be weighted to develop a quality score are as follows:

■ Domain names and URLs

■ Page content

■ Link structure

■ Usability and accessibility

■ Meta tags

■ Page structure

It’s a melding of these and other factors — sometimes very carefully balanced factors — that are used to create the quality score. Exactly how much weight is given to each factor is known only

to the mathematicians who create the algorithms that generate the quality score, but one thing is certain: The better quality score your site generates, the better your search engine results will be, which means the more traffic you will have coming from search engines.

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Search engine results pages

noreply@blogger.com (aju) — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 12:38:00 +0000

The other sides of the query interface, and the only other parts of a search engine that’s visible to users, are the search engine results pages (SERPs). This is the collection of pages that are returned with search results after a user enters a search term or phrase and clicks the Search button. This is also where you ultimately want to end up; and the higher you are in the search results, the more traffic you can expect to generate from search. Specifically, your goal is to end up on the first page of results — in the top 10 or 20 results that are returned for a given search term or phrase. Getting there can be a mystery, however. We’ll decode the clues that lead you to that goal throughout the book, but right now you need to understand a bit about how users see SERPs.

Let’s start with an understanding of how users view SERPs. Pretend you’re the searcher. You go to your favorite search engine — we’ll use Google for the purposes of illustration because that’s everyone’s favorite, isn’t it? Type in the term you want to search for and click the Search button. What’s the first thing you do when the page appears? Most people begin reading the titles and descriptions of the top results. That’s where you hook searchers and entice them to click through the links provided to your web page. But here’s the catch: You have to be ranked close enough to the top for searchers to see those results page titles and descriptions and then click through them, which usually means you need to be in the top 10 or 20 results, which translates into the first page or two of results. It’s a tough spot to hit.

There is no magic bullet or formula that will garner you those rankings every time. Instead, it takes hard work and consistent effort to push your site as high as possible in SERPs. At the risk of sounding repetitive, that’s the information you’ll find moving forward. There’s a lot of it, though, and to truly understand how to land good placement in SERPs, you really need to understand how search engines work. There is much more to them than what users see.

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Structure of a search engine

noreply@blogger.com (aju) — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 15:04:00 +0000

By now you probably have a fuzzy idea of how a search engine works, but there’s much more to it than just the basic overview you’ve seen so far. In fact, search engines have several parts. Unfortunately, it’s rare that you find an explanation describing just how a search engine is made — that’s proprietary information that search companies hold very close to their vests — and that information is vitally important to succeeding with search engine optimization (SEO).

Query interface

The query interface is what most people are familiar with, and it’s probably what comes to mind when you hear the term ‘‘search engine.’’ The query interface is the page, or user interface, that users see when they navigate to a search engine to enter a search term. There was a time when the search engine interface looked very much like the Ask.com page shown in figure. This interface was a simple page with a search box and a button to activate the search, and not much more.

Today, many search engines on the Web have added much more personalized content in an attempt to capitalize on the real estate available to them. For example, Yahoo! Search, shown in Figure, is just one of the search services that now enable users to personalize their pages with a free e-mail account, weather information, news, sports, and many other elements designed to make users want to return to that site to conduct their web searches. One other option users have for customizing the interfaces of their search engines is a capability like the one Google offers. The Google search engine has a customizable interface to which users can add different gadgets. These gadgets enable users to add features to their customized Google search home page that meet their own personal needs or tastes.

Search has even extended onto the desktop. Google and Microsoft both have search capabilities that, when installed on your computer, enable you to search your hard drive for documents and information in the same way you would search the Web. These capabilities aren’t of any particular use to you where SEO is concerned, but they do illustrate the prevalence of search and the value that users place on being able to quickly find information using searching capabilities.

When it comes to search engine optimization, Google’s user interface offers the most potential for you to reach your target audience, because it does more than just optimize your site for search: If a useful tool or feature is available on your site, you can enable users to have access to this tool or feature through the Application Programming Interface (API) made available by Google. Using the Google API, you can create a gadget that users can install on their Google Desktop, iGoogle page, or Firefox or Chrome browser. This enables you to have your name in front of users on a daily basis.

For example, a company called PDF24.org offers a Google gadget that enables users to turn their documents into PDF files right from their Google home page once the gadget has been added. If the point of search engine optimization is ultimately to get your name in front of as many people as possible, as often as possible, then making a gadget available for addition to Google’s personalized home page can only further that goal.

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Google Page Rank - Read More About The Concept-

noreply@blogger.com (aju) — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 03:44:00 +0000

PageRank is one of those mysteries that may never be completely unraveled. Volumes have been written about it, but probably the only two people in the world who understand it completely are Larry Page and Sergey Brin. That’s because it was their brainchild.

PageRank actually started as part of a research project that Page and Brin were working on at

Stanford University. The project involved creating a new search engine that ranked pages in a

democratic fashion with a few weights and measures thrown in for accuracy. Hence, the term.

(What else would you call a ranking system for web pages that was developed by Larry Page?)

The interesting thing about PageRank is that although Page and Brin conceived the idea and created the algorithm that arrives at a PageRank, it didn’t belong to them. Stanford University actually owned the patent on the PageRank algorithm until Google purchased the exclusive right to use the algorithm for 1.8 million shares of the company (which were sold in 2005 for $336 million).

PageRank is a method by which web pages are ranked in Google search results. A combination of factors create the actual rank of a web page. Google explains it this way: ‘‘PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the Web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves ‘‘important’’ weigh more heavily and help to make other pages ‘‘important.’’’ In other words, it’s a mystery. A page that has more links (with equal votes) might rank lower than a page that has a single link that leads to a ‘‘more important’’ page. The lesson? Create pages for visitors, not for search engines.

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Search Engine Basics

noreply@blogger.com (aju) — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 05:40:00 +0000

What do you do when you need to find some bit of information — a fact, a statistic, a description,a product, or even just a phone number? In most cases, you bring up one of the major search engines and type in the term or phrase that you’re looking for and then click through the results, right? Then, like magic, the information you were looking for is right at your fingertips, accessible in a fraction of the time it used to take. But of course search engines weren’t always around.

In its infancy, the Internet wasn’t what you think of when you use it now. In fact, it was nothing like the web of interconnected sites that has become one of the greatest business facilitators of our time. Instead, what was called the Internet was actually a collection of FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites that users could access to download (or upload) files.

To find a specific file in that collection, users had to navigate through each file. Sure, there were shortcuts. If you knew the right people — that would be the people who knew the exact address of the file you were looking for — you could go straight to the file. That’s assuming you knew exactlywhat you were looking for.

The whole process made finding files on the Internet a difficult, time-consuming exercise in patience; but that was before a student at McGill University in Montreal decided there had to be an easier way. In 1990, Alan Emtage created the first search tool used on the Internet. His

creation, an index of files on the Internet, was called Archie.

If you’re thinking Archie the comic book character created in 1941, you’re a little off track (at least for now). The name Archie was used because the filename Archives was too long. Later, Archie’s pals from the comic book series (Veronica and Jughead) came on to the search scene, too, but we’ll get to that shortly.

Archie wasn’t actually a search engine like those that you use today, but at the time it was a

program many Internet users were happy to have. The program basically downloaded directory

listings for all the files that were stored on anonymous FTP sites in a given network of computers.

Those listings were then plugged in to a searchable database of web sites. Archie’s search capabilities weren’t as fancy as the natural language capabilities you find in most common search engines today, but at the time it got the job done. Archie indexed computer files, making them easier to locate.

In 1991, however, another student named Mark McCahill, at the University of Minnesota, realized that if you could search for files on the Internet, then surely you could also search plain

text for specific references in the files. Because no such application existed, he created Gopher, a program that indexed the plain-text documents that later became the first web sites on the public Internet.

With the creation of Gopher, there also needed to be programs that could find references within the indexes that Gopher created, and so Archie’s pals finally rejoined him. Veronica (Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives) and Jughead (Jonzy’s Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation and Display) were created to search the files that were stored in the Gopher Index System.

Both of these programs worked in essentially the same way, enabling users to search the indexed information by keyword. From there, search as you know it began to mature. The first real search engine, in the form that we know search engines today, didn’t come into being until

1993. Developed by Matthew Gray, it was called Wandex. W

a ndex was the first program to both index and search the index of pages on the Web. This technology was the first program to crawl the Web, and later became the basis for all search crawlers. After that, search engines took on a life of their own. From 1993 to 1998, the major search engines that you’re probably familiar with today were created:

■ Excite—1993

■ Yahoo!—1994

■ Web Crawler —1994

■ Lycos —1994

■ Infoseek— 1995

■ AltaVista — 1995

■ Inktomi—1996

■ Ask Jeeves — 1997

■ Google —1997

■ MSN Search—1998

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Understanding SEO

noreply@blogger.com (aju) — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 16:28:00 +0000

Search engine optimization (SEO) is such a broad term. It can be quite overwhelming if you try to take the whole of it in a single bite. There are so many facets of search engine optimization, from how search engines work (and they all work a little differently) to how a web page is designed. There are enough elements to worry about that you could spend far more time than you can afford to invest in trying to achieve the SEO you have in mind. However, search engine optimization doesn’t have to be such an onerous task that it can’t be accomplished — not if you understand what it is and how it works.

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