How do search engines work?
How do I make sure my businesses’ website comes up when someone Googles “lawyers olympia.” Does the word “lawyer” or “Olympia” need to be somewhere specific? How do you make sure that it comes up first on the list that comes up?
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Back in the day there were search tags you put into HTML, I haven’t built anything that needed searching in ages. Hopefully, someone here can give you something more recent.
Google works by crawling the mass of websites on the internet with small little programs, known as “spiders.” With the information gathered, it turns the content of every webpage into binary information that can be searched quickly.
Your search, too, is translated into byte code that can be compared to the data from the spiders.
My advice to you is to include the words as many times in the authoring of your site as you can. Don’t use flash; google can’t index that…
Also, include your search terms in the meta info when building the page…
You make sure you have the words “Olympia lawyers” on your website so that Google will index it, and you create content that other people link to. Of course, you can’t just make a blank page with “olympia lawyers” copied and pasted throughout it, because Google is smart and knows better than to be tricked like that.
META information is great to add in, but is no longer the primary way of getting your site indexed. Google has made its business on providing accurate, high value search results, and META tags aren’t the primary way it does this (PageRank is one of them, and you can find lots of info by doing a Google search for that word).
Have a blog if you can, that will be indexed often, and if you write about relevant topics not only will your clients find you (such as if they do a Google search for “olympia divorce lawyer” and you have made a blog post about divorce proceedings), but you can link with other lawyer blogs and thus increase your PageRank.
But there is no real way of making sure it comes up as number one in the results. If there was, the entire integrity of Google’s search engine is discarded, as it would just turn into a bidding war.
Make sure you have your address in visible, actual text that the spiders can crawl and submit your site to Google and you will get put on the list next to the map. However, there are already a lot of listings for that keyword phrase, so it will take time and effort to get your site listed on the first page.
You may want to look into additional keywords that would be more specific to your practice and you will want to spend a LOT of time researching optimization techniques and applying them to your site. There is much more than on page optimization to consider when you plan your online marketing strategy.
Either that or do some research and find a good company to help you optimize your site. There are a lot of bad practices out there, so make sure you see case studies and have a good understanding of the differences between what different companies try to sell you.
Just to make it even more fun and interesting, each search engine (google, yahoo, msn, ask, etc…) use different criteria to rate your site. This rating is what determines your ranking when displayed for search results. Try searching for engine specific tips and you may find what you are looking for. There are companies you can hire to help with this, but for most people, they are overkill and can even get you banned altogether if you are not careful.
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websearch akebono for some history
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