If you have a Website, you may be wondering how to get to the top of the search engines when someone enters a search term related to your business?

To begin with Google has to know that your website exists. It will find your site in one of two ways:

Your website is then analyzed by a program called GoogleBot. This program (called a ’spider’) goes through all the links on your site, looks at the text on your website, and puts together a host of other bits of information it can pick up to help it determine what your site is about and how it should be ranked.

When Google looks for websites that might match a searcher’s request, it doesn’t go through every page in your document. Instead, it numbers each page on your site and creates an index from the text that appears on the pages.

For example, your site may contain the word ‘back’ on pages 1,2, and 5; the word ‘pain’ on pages 2 and 5; and the word ‘relief’ on page 5.

Now when someone types in ‘back pain’ in the Google search box, Google knows that pages 2 and 5 contain both those words and may be relevant for the person searching. If someone types in ‘back pain relief’ Google can see that only one page on your site contains all three of the searched words and can determine that that web page is the most relevant for the searcher.

By understanding this indexing process, you can see how important the words on your web pages are in getting indexed and ranked by Google and the other search engines. If your site was created in a way that Google’s spiders can’t read, then Google can’t figure out how to index your site. As a result, you don’t show up in the search engine results.

For this reason, we highly suggest creating your site using simple HTML code that any engine can read.

For the most part, sites made with Flash technology (those are the beautiful sites with moving images and sounds) can’t be read by search engine spiders.

The search engines also have a hard time with sites made with those easy to use online website builders. These builders are terrific to use. But even though it seems as though they create HTML pages, in fact your website information is stored in databases. And the spiders can’t necessarily extract the information from these databases when they visit your pages.

The website builder that will soon be released through HereToHelpYou.com is unique in this regard in that unlike other builders that use database technology, we’ve developed a proprietary system that actually publishes real HTML pages, exactly what the search engines love to see. If you’d like more information on this, get on the announcement list and you’ll be one of the first notified when this is released to the public.

Click here to be the first to be notified: www.heretohelpyou.com/website-builder.php

Knowing how Google indexes pages also helps you realize the importance of having text on your web pages that searchers are likely to type into their search box when looking for businesses like yours. You don’t want to have lots of pictures on your site and rely on images to convey information. If you do, your site is not as likely to be found on Google as your competitors’ websites that have solid information written in simple text.

The old cliché ‘content is king’ is true. The search engines like to see lots of words so they can determine accurately what your site is all about and can rank it appropriately.

Once GoogleBot goes through your site, you can consider yourself indexed. But just because you have been ’spidered’ and indexed doesn’t mean that Google is going to include you in its index of sites to display.

There are a lot of factors that will determine whether or not Google will include you in displayed results and over the next several issues of the Two Web Guys’ Newsletter, we’ll look at some of these factors. More specifically, we’ll look at how you can create a Website that will rank high in the results, get found by potential customers and give your business a strong advantage over your competitors.

About the authors
Paul Rochford and Eric Brown are The Two Web Guys and are dedicated to helping small businesses get more customers through the power of the Internet. Listen to their weekly radio show, learn more about their services and sign up for more FREE tips like this one. Visit http://www.thetwowebguys.com.

NOTE: You’re welcome to reprint this article online as long as it remains complete and unaltered, including the ‘about the authors’ info at the end with an active link to http://www.thetwowebguys.com.