Everybody who has a web site or want to have a web site dreams of getting the top most ranking in search engines, especially google search engine. Since word "Google" has become a verb in dictionary, it has become important that people should be able to google your site. The title article of this title is in no way indication that google is the only dominant search engine in space. It is true that google has emerged victorious and commands major share in market but other search engines do have their significant share too. And lately there has been rumors of MSN and Yahoo merger. If that happens then the combined front will become the largest share holder in search engine space.

This article will try to explain some of the common questions that lot of people ask about search engine positions and inclusion. Through this article I will try to answer some of the frequently asked questions like

• How do I make my web site appear in google?
• How can I get high ranking in google?
• What meta tags should I use to improve search engine rankings?
• How can I make my web site appear in google quickly>
• ..... and more

Most of the discussion applies to all the search engines. But each search engine has its own algorithm of crawling, indexing and assigning ranking to content. So there are certain things that work in some search engines and the same tricks may not work in other. So I will try to point out some of the differences when I discuss those techniques. Lets see what you need to do to get your site included in google search engine.

• First obvious step in the process is that you need to have your web site ready. Here is first rule that you should try to follow. Do not make your site live if your content is not ready. What this means is that if you go live with half baked site or site with wrong content, the search engine will index your site for that content and you will achieve position in search engine for that context of content and not what your intentions were. It is better to wait for couple of days and finish the content and then submit the site. One of our clients had a terrible experience with this kind of mistake. He was a eager beaver and could not wait to get site live and did not realize that he has wrong content. His site was about electronic goods and he accidentally had some content about swim suits on the page. And guess what, the site started appearing in swim suit search. Go figure.

• When you are creating content make sure that you have some quality content or your content is relevant to the site. One of the tips from google is to create site for users and not for search engine bots. If you have quality content, users will stick to your site. Google algorithms are based mostly on human nature. If you will try to cheat the search bot it can punish you too by dropping you from ranking all together. I will discuss some of these optimization techniques later.

• Check TITLE and DESCRIPTION tags on top of each page. Make sure that they are correct and reflect the content of that page. You may be wondering that I did not specify KEYWORDS meta tag. Lately it seems that this meta tag has lost its importance because lot of people tried to abuse this tag and tried to spam the search engine by adding irrelevant keywords in there. KEYWORDS meta tag used to be important couple of years ago. Now google's algorithms have matured and they go after the content of the site. They give more weight to content, TITLE and DESCRIPTION and low weight to KEYWORDS. But search engines like MSN, YAHOO, MAMMA etc. do pay attention to KEYWORDS meta tag. So do provide keywords but make sure that the keywords are relevant to content.

• Now check all your IMG tags and make sure that you have specified some relevant text in ALT attribute of the tag. It does help in providing more content for the search engine to index.

• Now check all links on your pages and make sure that they are not broken. Search engine bots tend to get annoyed with too many broken links on site and may remove your site from their crawling schedule.

• And now is the time to include your site into search engine. Goto following link on google site and provide information about your site and that completes the submission process.

  Google Search Engine Submission

• And now you just have to wait for google search bot to crawl your site. So have some patience because it will take few days for google bot to crawl the site. And then it takes some time to index the site and include it in their database.

• And do look at search engine guidelines from time to time. Following link is google's guidelines for web masters.

  Webmaster Guidelines