The intent of this article is to outline some of the basic technical guidelines and tools for consideration when improving the overall relevancy and importance of a Web site at a very high level.

Search engines have dramatically affected the way in which Web page content is formed. At least for now Google and other popular search engines indirectly aim to improve the quality of the Web pages they index, and in turn the quality of their products and services. If a Web page does not abide by Google's PageRank or the quality-policy system of other search engines, it will remain either invisible forever or lost amongst the millions of other pages near the bottom of the search results list.

PageRank Explained

[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."]

[Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query.]

The above two paragraphs were quoted from the Google Website on June 29, 2006: (http://www.google.com/technology/)

The following tips provide some insight towards improving a Web site's visibility amongst the competitors:

Become an affiliate or find affiliate Web sites and contact them for an exchange of links. Contact existing affiliates. Determine whether or not their Web site links to yours from an appropriate and high-ranking page, and if their Web site does not have good page rank (PR), if any, then possibly provide insight on improving the affiliated Web sites. An increase in their PR will increase the PR of your Web site.

Here is a possible scenario: If cnn.com (9/10 PR) had a link to your Web site for say a month, then the Web site would appear at the top of the search engine lists for the major keywords associated with the content of the pages during that month and depending on when Google updates the PR (usually within several days).

Sign up and add your Web site to Google's free sitemap service, which provides an analysis of the spider crawl results for all the Web pages including stats on: Google's aggregation of keywords based on Web page content (compare to expected keywords), Crawler errors encountered (missing Web pages, etc.), most popular Web pages, etc. https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=sitemaps

Monitor Web site statistics from Web server management utilities (most have them, and they are free to acquire). One common Web site statistical package is AwStats. It contains statistics on # of viewers by time/day/month over a range of years, location by Country, IP address tracking, actual search engine keywords and phrases used in search criteria, client Web browsers used, entry/exit pages, pages most viewed and the total duration of viewing each page, etc. Most statistical tools also include appealing bar graphs for such depictions. This should be monitored once in a while to determine trends in popularity and as an aid to increasing the Web site's rank.

Integrity

The integrity of a search engine is based on the complex control mechanisms and policies that govern its functioning, and prevent "cheating" the system when Web sites are both indexed and ranked. Some of the popular search engines are based on fair and logical principles in order to provide a means of finding the most relevant and high quality Web sites, others are corrupted by advertising agreements.

Google AdWords (cost per click) is a paid method by which a Web site or portion of a Web site may appear at the right side of relevant search results under the sponsored links for visibility. This service is geared more towards businesses selling goods or services. https://adwords.google.com

A discussion on the topic of paid advertising would be too specific for inclusion in this article, as elaboration on cost-per-click (CPC) keyword selection and bidding strategy are extensive topics.

Technical Webmaster guidelines are not an issue with Web sites that have already been indexed, but additional Web pages should adhere to search-engine policies. These guidelines may be a consideration for affiliate Web sites.

The integrity of a Web page is where the technical aspect comes into play here. In order to prevent human tampering (Web development hacks, loop hole advantages), certain Web page elements are considered hacks or they are simply disregarded. The obvious elements can cause an entire Web site to become banned completely from the search engine (hidden links, link color and background merge due to color similarities). Other elements rich with DHTML (Dynamic HTML containing JavaScript) may be ignored or cause interruption of the spiders crawling the Web page for indexing due to the complexity of JavaScript. Use the Lynx plain text Web browser to obtain a general sense of what the spiders will see when encountering a Web site: http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html. However, as a word of caution, the text browser interpretation of a Web page has no exact parallel to the interpretation by a search engine spider crawl. It is common for DHTML-intensive Web pages to be successfully interpreted by text browsers, but they fail interpretation by spiders during a crawl due to JavaScript code or perhaps some other factors including a major lack of W3C compliance, and the existence of serious structural Web page errors. Missing tags and incomplete or incorrect nesting of tags can cause great confusion during interpretation.

Webmaster design guidelines as provided by Google:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769