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Video of Brad Speaking at the Big Day In in 2007 on Rocketing your Website to the Top of the Search Engines:

You have a fabulous looking website and everything seems to be in place. You are offering fantastic services or products that you are sure that Internet users will immediately snatch up. You submitted your website to the Internet search engines and are excited to see what happens. However, you are now scratching your head wondering why your website can’t be seen.

When you submit a website to a search engine, it will not automatically appear. The search engine needs time to recognize that your website even exists. One of the reasons behind the lag is that the search engines use what’s called a crawler that scans the content of your website. Once your website is submitted to a search engine, it can take days or weeks for the crawler to visit your website and perform its scan.

A downside to these crawlers is that they sometimes have issues seeing the website. Website owners and designers sometimes focus more on the look of the website over the content. Eye pleasing flash and JavaScript can sometimes block the crawler or bot from being able to recognize the content of your website.

You also might not be able to see your website listed in the search engine because it is not listed within the first few pages. Each internet search engine has thousands, if not millions of websites relating to certain subject matters. If your website it about candles and you type in the keyword “candle,” the search engine is going to return page after page of website results.

Search engines tend to trust older websites over newer websites. They do this, because websites are built and then forgot about by their owners at times. The longer the website has been around, the higher up the website it going to be in the search engine listings.

Your website may also be unseen because of content issues (or lack of content). The content on your website has to be highly related to keywords that are being searched for. Going back to the candle website example; you are selling scented candles which are based on the smells of nature. If an internet user is searching for “nature scented candles”; the search engine is going to bring up websites which contain those keywords in the content first. If the words “nature”, “scented” and “candles” are not listed on your website or listed without the correct keyword density, your website is not going to show high up in the search engine results.

When a website is completed, one of the things that seems to fall under the table, is the number of good incoming and outgoing links. As mentioned, internet search engines value websites which are trusted. Another way for the search engines to think that a website is trusted, is if they are linked to other websites which have existed a long time, have good content and is ranked high in the search engines.

Simply placing a link to another high ranked website on one of your pages is not going to do the trick however. You need not only provide a link to other trusted websites, but those websites need to provide links to your site (reciprocal link). You also need to be very careful which websites you link to. Linking to websites which have low page ranks in the search engines can actually do more harm than good.

While these are just a few of the different reasons why your website is not appearing in the search engines that you submitted your site to, it is a good starting point to research the issue.

Cloaking is a way of trying to deceive the search engines. In the SEO (search engine optimization) world, it is considered “Black Hat SEO”. It is not an SEO tactic which is highly regarded in the industry, but there are those which will still try and slip it past the search engine crawlers in hope that it will not be picked up on.

Cloaking happens when the content that the crawler, spider or robot s sees is different from what a user of the website would see. Cloaking can detect whether the user is a search engine crawler or a regular user based on the IP address.

Cloaking is a tactic which is used in SEO to try and get the website listed higher in the search engine results. The principle behind this method is the same as using hidden text, but cloaking and hidden text are two separate tactics. The only purpose of cloaking is to try to get the search engine spider, robot or crawler to see search engine friendly information, even though that information is not actually displayed to the normal users of the website.

For example, cloaking would want the search engine crawler to see a website which contains more keywords than the user would see when visiting the website. This is done to trick the search engines believe that the website is more relevant to the keyword terms than it really is. One may ask why website developers do not just put up the websites which contain the search engine friendly information that they want the crawlers to see?  Simply, this is not done due to the fact that if the user saw the cloaked version of the website, it would not be visually appealing. By cloaking a website, it stays beautiful to the human eye, but it also becomes more search engine friendly.

Cloaking however as mentioned, is not highly regarded by the search engines. If the crawler finds that the website is using cloaking techniques, the website may actually be banned or penalized.

Every search engine out there has their own process; algorithm or method in decided a website’s page rank. PageRankTM is a trademark of Google and is licensed by the two founding partners of Google.

The actual factors that go into Google’s PageRankTM are actually quite simple. Even though Google has over 100 different factors that determine page rank, there is only one which determines PageRankTM. In order to understand this, we need to understand the difference between a website’s page rank and PageRankTM. Page rank uses all of the algorithms and criteria to calculate how important a website is based on its content and other factors. PageRankTM is Google’s way of determining a website’s importance and popularity based on the number of inbound (incoming) links the website has.

The algorithm Google uses, looks at the number incoming links to a website and then compares it against other websites in the Google index. Google rates a website on a scale of 0 to 10 in their PageRankTM system. The higher the number, the better PageRankTM a website has. The higher the PageRankTM is, the more popular that website is deemed by Google and as I mentioned, this popularity is based off of the number of incoming links the website has. It is also based off of the quality of incoming links.

When it comes down to it, how much does Google PageRankTM affect your overall rankings in Google? Remember what I mentioned above- Google’s PageRankTM is only one out of a hundred or so algorithms Google uses in determining a website’s importance. If you have a low PageRankTM, it is not the end of the world and it does not mean that your site will be buried in Google.

Other factors on your website such as quality content, keywords and traffic also affect your overall page rank on Google. Now if you have bad content, your website is not receiving much traffic and your PageRank is low or non-existent, your search engine ranking in Google is not going to be that great. You can however have a popular website which shows up high in the search engine results without having a high PageRank. PageRank is only part of the equation, not the only equation that matters.