Google's Gonna Get You Google-bot is like Borg in Star Trek. If you exist on web and have a link coming to your site from another site in Google's index, Google-bot will find you and assimilate all your information. As best known and most prolific spider on web, Google-bot and its cousin Fresh-bot visit sites extremely frequently. This means that most websites with effective links will get into Google's database without needing to manually submit site. As Google currently does not have a paid-inclusion model, every page in a site can be expected to appear somewhere on Google produced SERPs. By providing a way of finding each page in site (effective internal links), website designers should see their sites appearing in Google's database within two months of publishing.

We Now Serve Two Masters; Google and Inktomi OK, that said, how to optimize for both without risking placements at one over other. The basic answer is to give each of them what they want. For almost a year, much of SEO industry focused on linking strategies in order to please Google's PageRank. Such heavy reliance on linking is likely one of reasons Google re-ordered its algorithm in November. Relevant incoming links are still be extremely important but can no longer be considered "clincher" strategy for our clients. Getting back to basics of site optimization and remembering lessons learned over past 12-months should produce Top10 placements. SEOs and webmasters should spend a lot of time thinking about titles, tags and text as well as thinking about linking strategies (both internal and external). Keyword arrangement and densities are back on table and need to be examined by SEOs and their clients as new backbone of effective site optimization. While addition of a text-based sitemap has always been considered an SEO Best Practice, it should now be considered an essential practice. The same goes for unique titles and tags on each page of a site. Another essential practice SEOs will have to start harping on is to only work with sites that have unique, original content. I am willing to bet that within 12-months, Inktomi introduces a rule against duplicate content as a means of controlling both SEO industry and affiliate marketing industry. Sites with duplicate content are either mirrors, portals or affiliates, none of which should be necessary for hard-working SEO. While there are exceptional circumstances where duplicate content is needed, more often than not dupe-content is a waste of bandwidth and will impede a SEO campaign more than it would help.

The last tip for this article is, don't be afraid to pass higher costs on to clients because if your client wants those placements soon, paid-inclusion of internal pages will be expected. When one really examines costs of paid inclusion it is not terribly different than other advertising costs, with one major exception. Most paid-advertising is regionally based (or is prohibitively expensive for smaller businesses). Search engine advertising is, by nature, international exposure and that is worth paying for.