Seeing How Google Works
The following information is taken from www.plattsburgh.edu/intranet/webresources/seo.phpGoogle runs programs, called Googlebots, which crawl the Web constantly and harvest Web pages for the eventual input into the main Google database.
Googlebots "read" a Webpage much like we do, so clean, efficiently-coded HTML pages are rewarded.
Googlebots arrive slowly, one or two at first. Then they return the next day, eight or nine of them, and each Googlebot visits four to eight pages each. They keep returning for a week or so, and then they vanish. New pages are finally indexed into the Google database every months or so.
After Google starts indexing new information from your site into the main database, it takes about a week for Google to copy this information across all their thousands of machines.
That may seem obvious, but some people get confused when their "Photo Album" (featuring nothing but photographs, navigation icons made from images without alt tags, and no text) isn't well ranked.
After all, how can Google know your page is about "cats" when you never actually use the word "cat" in plain text on the page?
Google likes structured and semantically rich documents.
How does Google tell whether your page is about leprechauns versus just making a passing reference to leprechauns? It's easy when you build a structured document.
Through building a structured document, the Googlebot attempts to rank the importance of a given keyword. For instance, a keyword echoed in H1 or H2 headline text or boldface type is taken to be a more primary subject than one merely mentioned in the body text (though the number of occurances in the body text is relevant as well). This looks like:
Most important information in a subheading
My content
Second most important information in a subheading
More content
Google is like everyone else on the Web: it likes new, up-to-date content.
The Google Freshbot indexes select portions of the Web on a daily or weekly rather than monthly basis. It is attracted to blog-like and/or newsfeed-like features. So, update your site often with topical, contemporary information that your audience values.
Google has respect for all browsers, and thus feels more warmly about pages that can be parsed by any browser, no matter how humble, rather than cryptic pages that require the latest and greatest browser bristling with bleeding-edge plug-ins in order to work.
Google looks for well-crafted and semantically valid HTML, like internal anchor names related to sub-topics, subject headlines, text justification and paragraph size to help determine the kind of content a page contains. Google gets mad if you snub the blind man using Lynx, because that's evil.
Linking to similarly themed sites that Google already respects adds a layer of sugar to your content. Google is happy that you have contributed your grey matter to culling the content of the Internet, and rewards you with a certain amount of good faith that you know what you're talking about, and are not linking random, stupid things.
Being linked to by a respected site (in this context a site with a high PageRank) is the single best way to boost your listing. Being linked to/from sites themed with related keywords amplifies this effect, especially when the anchoring link text itself contains relevant keywords (for example "cool kitten adoption site" rather than the infamous "click here ").
Google likes you to tell it where you are. It thinks city names are delicious. This has the additional benefit of allowing you to talk about the benefits that our location offers to students.