Visitors - This web page is intended for individuals, small to medium sized businesses and others that have already initiated a web presence through domain name registration, a web hosting plan, design and development of a web site or blog site and publishing of their site on the Internet. The next step is to build traffic and page rankings for your site, which we will discuss briefly below.

Introduction

Great content, keyword value, link referral and ultimately top ranking with search engines has always been important on the Internet. Today, the success of websites, blogs, articles and similar web based information depends on successful social networking, social bookmarking and several other advertising, marketing and promotion methods.

Google Search | Yahoo Search | Bing (formerly Live Search and MSN Search)

This web page corresponds to the Freelance Writers Network Webmasters and Bloggers Group

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Bing (formerly MSN Search and Live Search) — Channeling information throughout the globe are the three largest search portals, Google, Yahoo and Bing. They are fierce competitors, yet together these giants of the Internet form the hub of emerging search technologies. By no means are these three alone. There are literally hundreds more trying to capture a share of a rapidly growing market.

In the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), there is a popular belief that submitting to many search engines is a great way to generate traffic to your website or blog. In the opinion of this web author, most search engines will find your site before you find them. Submitting to numerous search engines is more likely to result in more SPAM to your email address than traffic to your website or blog.

A more effective, free, less time consuming and reliable approach would be to submit your site URL to Google, Yahoo and Bing. Let the search engines do the rest. To assist search engines, the robots.txt and sitemap files are important. Site validation and browser compatibility are other important factors leading to the success of websites, blogs and their owners.

#1 Google Search at  Google.com - Google Inc. American publicly owned. Google is the world leader in advertising and search engine services. Add your URL to Google.

Recommended source for further information: Google - From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

#2 Yahoo Search at  Yahoo.com - Yahoo! Inc. American publicly owned and the second largest provider of search engine services. Submit your site to Yahoo.

Recommended source for further information: Yahoo - From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

#3 Microsoft Bing at  Bing.com - Bing (formerly Live Search, Windows Live Search, MSN Search). American publicly owned and the third largest provider of search engine services. Submit your site to Bing.

Recommended source for further information: Bing - From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Website robots.txt, sitemap, validation and browser compatibility - All play an important role in the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) process. Search engines will periodically crawl your website or blog using a search bot (hence, the name for the robots.txt file). Each search engine service like Google, Yahoo and Bing indexes the information found in the crawling process to speed up retrieval of search results when web browsers use these services. A sitemap makes it easier for search engines to find the information needed for indexing.

Validation and browser compatibility have a direct impact on the ability to adequately view a site and read its content. Visitors will typically avoid returning to a site where they have had a poor user experience. Please see Resources below for links to sources of information about these important topics.

These days, blog space is almost always free. Blogger, WordPress and LiveJournal are well known and completely FREE. Another provider of free blog space is Microsoft (see the article linked under Resources below).

Blogger - At Google's Blogger.com "Create a blog. It’s free." To create a blog on Blogger (Blogspot), you first need to have a Google account. Unlike the past, these days with one Google account you can access numerous offerings from Google. Creating and maintaining multiple blogs with Blogger is simple; it's all controlled from one convenient, easy to use control panel.

WordPress - WordPress.com is where you will find one of the world's most widely used blogging applications. Free blog, free features, practically no set-up needed and hosted on WordPress.com—It's all FREE! You can even move your WordPress blog from WordPress.com to another web host. A lot of web hosts have a quick install for WordPress included with their web hosting plans. Still, for those do it yourself types, the WordPress application can be downloaded free from WordPress.org. With a little time and effort, you can configure and upload your own WordPress blog to your hosted website.

LiveJournal - Here at Freelance Writers, we're anxious to find out what LiveJournal has to offer bloggers. We will be creating an account on LiveJournal.com very soon. Please check back to read about our experience with this free blogsite.

Technorati - Initially a blog search engine, Technorati Media is now a full service media company serving advertisers, bloggers and publishers. If you're getting ready to build a small website or a blog site, Technoratimedia.com sets a great example.

Did You Know that Technorati is looking for writers? Go to their Contact page, select Message Type "New: Technorati Writer Signup" from the drop down—you know what to do next—best of luck!

Learn more about Search Engine Technology - From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Read specifically about the Web Search Engine - From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The robots.txt file - There are thousands of websites and other places on the Internet (e.g., Google Webmaster URLs) where you can learn about the robots.txt file. Here's a site we really like. Don't trip over the guy's/gal's ads (no, they are not ours) Here's the home page intro from The Web Robots Pages website, "Web Robots (also known as Web Wanderers, Crawlers, or Spiders), are programs that traverse the Web automatically. Search engines such as Google use them to index the web content, spammers use them to scan for email addresses, and they have many other uses."

The sitemap file - Recall that Google account from which you can access numerous other offerings? Use that account to sign-up for the free Google Webmaster Tools. From Google Webmaster Central (no account needed) you can learn more about robots.txt, creating and submitting sitemaps and more.

Validation - Most medium to high priced web development software applications have built-in validation tools and options. Those tools and options do not always make the validation process any easier. In short, few websites are compliant to existing standards.

The most recognized, reputable and accepted source for validation standards and online validation tools are the free services on the W3C.org website using their Markup Validation Service. My opinion is unless your site is in the top 100,000 sites ranked by Alexa, don't spend to much time (if any) with validation. Now, if your site is in the Alexa top 100,000 sites, it's time to dot the i's and cross the t's!

Browser compatibility - Similar to validation, most medium to high priced web development software (Adobe and Microsoft products for example) have built-in browser compatibility and rendering abilities. Moreover, there are free online tools available for you to check your web pages for browser compatibility and rendering.

The most popular web browsers are Firefox, Internet Explorer, Internet Explorer for Macintosh, Netscape, Opera and Safari. Whether your web pages were built with products from these companies or not, you can use there online tools. From Adobe, check out their BrowserLab (FREE to use online; account sign-up required). Then, there's Microsoft Expression Web Superview (FREE to download, install and run from local computer). Now, where would we look for others? Google, Yahoo or Bing perhaps?

LANWANMAN (2009). "Get a FREE Blog on Windows Live Spaces." Xomba.com. Retrieved from http://www.xomba.com/get_free_blog_windows_live_spaces.

LANWANMAN (2009). "Microsoft Versus Google: Online Writers Gear Up to Make More Money." Associated Content. Retrieved from http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1741316/microsoft_versus_google_online_writers.html.

Takeaway - On September 15, 2009, Wikipedia.com had an Alexa Ranking of 7 and a Google PageRank of 8/10. Are you mentioned anywhere on Wikipedia? Later, perform a Google search for "Ron Taylor wiki" without the quotes. Follow the link to Wikipedia. I'm the last on the list!

Author's closing comments - Please return often to check for updates to this page and especially for links added to the Resources section above. While information about domain names, web hosting, design and development of websites and blogs is already provided on our parent website at eSafeServ.com, detailed information about other topics will appear in blogs, forums and wiki's linked from this web page.

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