Search Engine Optimization
Three key processes in delivering search results to you are:
Crawling: Does Google know about your site? Can Google find it? Google's crawl process begins with a list of web page URLs, generated from previous crawl processes, and augmented with Sitemap data provided by webmasters. As Googlebot visits each of these websites it detects links on each page and adds them to its list of pages to crawl. New sites, changes to existing sites, and dead links are noted and used to update the Google index
Indexing: Can Google index your site? Googlebot processes each of the pages it crawls in order to compile a massive index of all the words it sees and their location on each page. In addition, they process information included in key content tags and attributes, such as Title tags and ALT attributes. Googlebot can process many, but not all, content types. For example, google cannot process the content of some rich media files or dynamic pages.
Serving: Does the site have good and useful content that is relevant to the user's search? When a user enters a query, google machines search the index for matching pages and return the results they believe are the most relevant to the user. Relevancy is determined by over 200 factors, one of which is the PageRank. PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In simple terms, each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site's PageRank. Not all links are equal: Google works hard to improve the user experience by identifying spam links and other practices that negatively impact search results. It's always evolving, for example, it no longer allows "reciprocal" links to be included. The best types of links are those that are given based on the quality of your content.
Canonical URLs are used from the search engines, and allow them to not report duplicate titles for HTML pages that are accessible from different URLs. Use a relative URL without the initial slash; canonical URLs that point to a different domain are normally not accepted.
