Internet-Marketing.web.id

Great 20-questions interview with Udi Manber, Google’s vice president in charge of search quality.

Since there has been such a thing as Web search, Udi Manber has been working on Web search. Previously a computer science professor at the University of Arizona, then a senior vice president at Amazon and Yahoo’s chief scientist, Manber is now vice president in charge of search quality for Google, where he makes sure results are engineered to the utmost (near) perfection. In one of the only public interviews he’s ever sat down for, Manber gives PM a glimpse into how Google’s dominant engine helps you find what you want, how you can help it find you and how search is constantly evolving with the pace of technology. —Glenn Derene

One of the questions posed was this question, “Do you find that the content on the Web is evolving to be more search-engine friendly?”

Manber’s answer: “It’s hard to say. It’s definitely still lacking. I wish people would put more effort into thinking about how other people will find them and putting the right keywords onto their pages.”

This touches on one our mission statements goals: helping people improve their search engine rankings with clear methodologies that are easy to understand and that are in complete compliance with the search engine guidelines.

We believe that SEO is about helping websites be as relevant as possible so that they will rank for appropriate keywords on search engines. Search engines are a tool to help connect people with information they want. Our job as SEO specialists, is guide website owners towards their goal of creating quality content that search engines will find relevant to the topic of the website.

Properly selected keyword phrases, well-written content and web pages focused on specific topics assist the dominant search engine in indexing websites and providing salient SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Their reputation is based on the information they provide and SEOs help website’s define their message, products and services.

There’s no hard and fast rule here — and each search engine is different. But before you can even consider submitting, only submit your website once you have covered the Basic SEO Steps for your website (as outlined in internet-marketing.web.id). Not taking the time to fulfill these basic requirements will be detrimental to your SEO efforts.

Free Search Engine Submission – the Big 3

Using xml sitemaps

Assuming your sitemap is fully conformant to Sitemap Protocol 0.9 as dictated by sitemaps.org, you should only need to submit it once, but would need to update it onsite by re-generating the code every time you make an alteration to the structure of your site.

Using google sitemaps

If you have done this right you will only have to submit your sitemap once. Every website that you have a sitemap associated with it should be entered into google sitemaps. You must initially add your Sitemap to Google webmaster tools using your Google Account. Google will send a spider each day to check your sitemap and if any timestamps have changed the spider will look for the new page. All new content will be indexed very quickly. However, it could take time when it will be assigned proper ranking and will visible in searches.

If you provide a user link to your sitemap, you don’t even need to submit it as Google will find it and figure it out the next time it does a comprehensive crawl of your site. (Generally when it caches your site, you can find this out by typing your complete URL including the http into the google search field and noting what date your site was cached). Alternatively, take a look to your server log and find out how frequently your site has been crawled by Googlebot.

How do I resubmit my Sitemap once it has changed?

google: “When your Sitemap changes, you can resubmit it to Google to let us know.”

Seems to imply you can submit for any major changes, but I wouldn’t recommend too much, not more than once a month.

Don’t believe anyone who tells you they have the easy road to search engine rankings — they only want your money! It takes sweat and marketing savvy to build traffic to a site.

Some of the major search engines and most of the smaller search engines will provide a form that you can use to submit your site for free. With the smaller or thematic search engines, this is a good method to use. For each search engine you’ll just need to locate the submit URL form and submit your home page. There is no need to submit anything else. And, you don’t need to keep submitting your site month after month; generally every couple of month is sufficient or if you undergo any major website changes.

For a quick (& free) submission, simply follow these links (update: March 2008):

Google – http://www.google.com/addurl.html

Yahoo! – https://login.yahoo.com/config/login?.src=srch&.done=http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request
(requires Yahoo! account)

MSN – http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx