Saturday, August 26, 2006

Speaking Of Search....!!



I’m writing this without the intention of presenting detailed account of all the things that seem important to me at this time (Its 03:02 hrs IST). I’m writing for the sake of writing. There’s a lot going by in the field of Search, and this is my attempt to slow it down. (Can I really....? ;))

Anyways - coming back to Search - its effervescent nature has always served as
fuel for my inquisitive self.There is always a lot going on in the world around Google and a lot more going on with the people talking about Google !!

Initially post reading books - "
The Search" & "The Google Story" - I perceived myself to be a Search Engine champ. But to my utter amazement inspite of best of my efforts 'n' application of all the street smartness I had - I couldn't manage to get Google's Robot to crawl my Blogs and index them :( I decide to do some more research....herez what I think I learnt...Err but before that some food for thought.....
  • The key to ranking high in and recieving traffic from the search engines is to optimize your site for specific keyword phrases that are not too competetive but still recieve enough traffic to make it worth your time to try to rank high for.
  • If you try to go after the most popular keywords you will find your site buried several pages in the search results and recieve little if any traffic as a result. Too many sites will be competing for the most popular keywords.
  • It is better to rank #1 or #2 for a specific keyword phrase such as "stock market investing tips" than to rank #100 for a more general keyword such as "stocks". "Stocks" may be searched for a lot more often but if you are buried so far down in the search results you won't get any traffic from it anyway.

So here we go:

  1. Make a list of targeted keyword phrases: Just sit down scratch ur grey cells to think about a list of possible phrases that your potential visitors will be searching for to reach your site. Being as specific and targeted will definately help. Next you should find the keyword phrases that will be most worth your time to go after using tools like - Keyword Selector & Keyword Tracker.
  2. Create an optimized page for each keyword phrase on your list: Many mortal souls like me trying to rank high in the search enginges make the mistake of trying to optimize for too many keywords on any one page. Thus, prepare separate page for every distinct phrase. Each page should provide information about the keyword phrase that it is being optimized for. Having your keyword phrase bolded or italicized somewhere on your page is also a good idea.
  3. Obtain quality backlinks to each of your pages: The third and most important step in ranking high in the search engines is to obtain links from outside sites. The mantra is "The more the better". Focussing your efforts on sites that themsleves have many links to them (or should I say a higher PageRank) will surely help.


Organic search engines are looking for specific word patterns on your page to decide whether it should be shown at the top of the results list, but you also know that your page must appeal to the searchers themselves. Infact there is separate field of study called the 'Search engine optimization'.

Btw - few minutes back a check on google did display by Blog. Wooooooolllaaaa - finally they have crawled my blog:

Now I better doze off to sleep ! Cao...!

Check these out for sure: 1 2