This video tutorial explain what exactly SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is.

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Other video tutorials in our SEO for Beginners series include:

1. What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?
2. How Search Engines Work
3. SEO Myths Explained
4. 5 Steps to improve your SEO
5. How to get your site listed in a few days
6. How to get free web submissions
7. How to boost your SERPS rankings
8. What is Google PageRank?
9. The importance of keywords
10. 5 free ways to get SEO traffic

We hope you enjoyed our SEO for Beginners course!

The following questions concerning your Google listing plus Do you have a question about your Google listing, sate ranking, page rank or index entry?

Questions such as:

• How do I get my site listed on Google?
• My web pages are not currently listed in Google. Why?
• My site’s listing in Google is incorrect.
• Google PageRank Information
• Reasons your site may not be included in Google.
• Google does not index all of my pages. Why?
• My information is outdated in the Google index.
• Google continues listing an ‘old’ version of my site.
• I am changing my URL in Google.
• There’s no description of my site in Google.
• The description of my site is wrong in Google.
• I’m in the Google index, but not listed for keyword “X”.

All of these Google questions are answered here:

Google Webmaster Information

Google may answer specific questions directly if you send yuor enquiry to them.

With our “Standard Submission” package after we have submitted your website to the search engines and directories it will take up to ten weeks for your website to be added to their indexes, depending on the search engine. Some smaller search engines will take only a few days to index your page. However, most of the other larger search engines will take several weeks. Such a delay between the date of submission and the date of indexing is due to the extremely high number of submissions (sometimes tens of thousands) that the most popular engines receive each day.

With the “Standard Submission” we only submit your website to the search engines and cannot guarantee that they will include your website in their indexes. If you want to ensure guaranteed fast inclusion of your website into search engine indexes, we recommend our De Luxe XL submission package.

You may have expected to add your Meta Tags (keywords, Description, Title, etc) when you placed your order? This is in fact not required.

When the search engine bots visit your website that we submit for you, then they will index the Meta Tags that are included on your website at this time.

If you update your Tags at any point then the search engines should update your Tags when they next re-index your website.

Depending on the timing of the submission and of our crawl, the entire process can take between six and eight weeks.

Excerpt taken from Google Webmaster Info

Each time Google update the database of web pages (about once a month), the index shifts. If your site was dropped from Google and you have not made major changes to it in the last month, Google will likely pick it up again in the next index. It’s possible your site was simply inaccessible when the robots tried to crawl it.

You may want to check and see if the number of other sites linking to your URL has decreased. This is the single biggest factor in determining what sites are indexed by Google, as we find most pages when our robots crawl the web and jump from page to page via hyperlinks. To find out who links to your site, use Google’s link: tool.

It’s also possible your rank decreased because other sites were found and assigned a higher rank. You can be assured that no one at Google has hand adjusted the results to boost the ranking of a site. Google’s order of results is automatically determined by several factors, including the PageRank algorithm. Please check out Google’s “Technology Overview page for more information on how this works.

Excerpt taken from Google Webmaster Info

Although Google index more than 8 billion web pages, they cannot guarantee that they will crawl all the pages on a particular site. However, Google are always working to increase the number of pages crawled and hope to include more pages in the index soon. For more information about how Google find and include pages in the index please read Google’s Technology Overview.

If your site’s internal link structure does not provide a path to all your pages, the Google robot may not see all the pages on your site. Google follows links from one page to the next, so pages that are not linked to by others may be missed.

Basically, you can’t buy your way into the actual search results. You can however, purchase advertising adjacent to Google results.

Excerpt taken from Google Webmaster Info

Google is a mechanized search engine, which employs robots known as ‘spiders’ to crawl the web on a monthly basis and find sites for inclusion in the Google index.

Reasons your site may not be included.

1) Your pages are dynamically generated. Google are able to index dynamically generated pages. However, because the web crawler can easily overwhelm and crash sites serving dynamic content, Google limit the amount of dynamic pages it indexes.

2) You employ doorway pages. Google does not encourage the use of doorway pages. Google want to point users to content pages, not to doorways or splash screens.

3) Your page uses frames. Google supports frames to the extent that it can. Frames tend to cause problems with search engines, bookmarks, emailing links and so on, because frames don’t fit the conceptual model of the web (every page corresponds to a single URL). If a user’s query matches the site as a whole, Google returns the frame set. If a user’s query matches an individual page on the site, Google returns that page. That individual page is not displayed in a frame — because there may be no frame set corresponding to that page.

If you are concerned with the description of your site as seen by search engines, please read “Search Engines and Frames”. It describes the use of the ‘NoFrames’ tag, which is used to provide alternative content. If, instead of providing alternative content, you use wording such as “This site requires the use of frames” or “Upgrade your browser”, then you are excluding both search engines and people who use browsers with frames turned off. (For example, audio web browsers, such as those used in automobiles and by the visually impaired, typically do not deal with frames, which are a visual mechanism.)

Excerpt taken from Google Webmaster Info

Google update their index about once a month. Each time Google update othe database of web pages, the index invariably shifts: new sites are found, some sites are lost, and sites ranking may change.

Your rank naturally will be affected by changes in the ranking of other sites. You can be assured that no one at Google has hand adjusted the results to boost the ranking of a site. Google’s order of results is automatically determined by several factors, including our PageRank algorithm. Please check out our Technology Overview page for more information on how this works.

You may want to check and see if the number of other sites linking to your URL has changed. This is the single biggest factor in determining what sites are indexed by Google, as Google find most pages when the robots crawl the web and jump from page to page via hyperlinks.

Excerpt taken from Google Webmaster Info

Google’s order of results is automatically determined by more than 100 factors, including Google’s PageRank algorithm.

Please check out Google’s Technology Overview page for more details. Due to the nature of our business and our interest in protecting the integrity of our search results, this is the only information Google make available to the public about the ranking system.

Excerpt taken from Google Webmaster Info

There is a standard method involving a “robots.txt” file for excluding robot crawlers. This will prevent Googlebot or other crawlers from visiting your site. Googlebot has a user-agent of “Googlebot”. In addition, Googlebot understands some extensions to the robots.txt standard: Disallow patterns may include * to match any sequence of characters, and patterns may end in $ to indicate that the $ must match the end of a name. For example, to prevent Googlebot from crawling files that end in gif, you may use the following robots.txt entry:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*.gif$

There is another standard for telling robots not to index a particular web page or follow links on it, which may be more helpful, since it can be used on a page-by-page basis. This method involves placing a “META” element into a page of HTML.

Remember, changing your server’s robots.txt file or changing the “META” elements on its pages will not cause an immediate change in what results Google returns. It is likely that it will take a while for any changes you make to propagate to Google’s next index of the web.

Excerpt taken from Google Webmaster Info

Google automatically takes a “snapshot” of each page it crawls and caches it. This enables us to show the search terms highlighted on text heavy pages so users can find relevant information quickly, and to retrieve pages for users if the site’s server temporarily fails. Users can access the cached version by choosing the “Cached” link on the search results page. If you do not want your content to be accessible through Google’s cache, you can use the NOARCHIVE meta-tag. Place this in the section of your documents:

This tag will tell robots not to archive the page. Google will continue to index and follow links from the page, but will not present cached material to users.

If you want to allow other robots to archive your content, but prevent Google’s robots from caching, you can use the following tag:

Note that the change will occur the next time Google crawls the page containing the NOARCHIVE tag (typically about once a month). If you want the change to take effect sooner than this, the site owner must contact us and request immediate removal of archived content. Also, the NOARCHIVE directive only controls whether the cached page is shown. To control whether the page is indexed, use the NOINDEX tag; to control whether links are followed, use the NOFOLLOW tag.

Excerpt taken from Google Webmaster Info

Except in instances involving legal issues or spam, Google’s policy for removing a page from our index requires that we obtain the permission of that page’s webmaster.

This prevents competitors from sabotaging each other’s listings. Please have the webmaster for the page in question contact us with proof that he/she is indeed the webmaster.

This proof must be in the form of a root level page on the site in question, requesting removal from Google. Once we receive the URL that corresponds with this root level page, we will remove the offending page from our index.

For more information on this process, please see http://www.google.com/remove.html

Excerpt taken from Google Webmaster Info

Google does not manually assign keywords to your site, nor do Google manually “boost” the rankings of any site. The ranking process is completely automated and depends on the relative PageRank of each result found.

The best way to improve your position in results is to have relevant content and multiple links from other web sites. If there are certain keywords you feel are essential to your site’s success, you may want to consider a targeted keyword advertising program.

Google does not sell placement in the results, but Google do have advertising positions available adjacent to them.

Excerpt taken from Google Webmaster Info