Page Getting Started

This section of the book lays the foundation for your work. It is highly recommended that you understand the concepts and perform the tasks discussed here, even if you feel they are basic or you already know them.

First deals with how Google works, while the second chapter discusses the important concept of keywords and how they form the basis of your future efforts and success with Google.

Before we continue, there are a few basic terms that you should understand right off the bat. These terms are the most often misunderstood by beginners. There are other terms you’ll need to know, but let’s get through these first.

Rank, ranking: a website’s actual placement or position on the free (unpaid) listings section of a search engine results page for a certain search term or phrase. It is meaningless to speak of website rank without specifying what search word or phrase you are ranked on. When someone says to you “My website is #1 on Google”, you need to ask “OK, but for which search term?” Your ranking on Google is dependent on a number of different factors, which is the subject of a significant portion of this guide.

PageRank: Google’s patented system for specifying a web page’s importance, which is but a single, albeit important, factor that determines rank. Many people confuse a page’s rank (what position they are on a search results page) with a page’s PageRank (PR) value. They are totally separate. Because of the confusion around PageRank, it will be discussed in detail later on.

Keywords: Keywords for those words and phrases that best define what a web page is all about, and are found in a variety of places on web pages. When someone enters a search term or phrase into Google, Google tries to find those web pages whose keywords match the search phrase the best. This is an oversimplification here, but you should get the idea. Some people confuse keywords with the META “Keywords” tag. They are not the same thing. The days of filling up the META Keywords tag with as many terms as possible are over. Google, along with most other search engines today, ignore META tags as they have been so abused.

Page title: The title of a web page is the text contained between the <TITLE></TITLE> tags at the top of an HTML file and is displayed in the top bar of a browser window. It is not the first heading of a web page or any other large text that may be displayed at the top of a web page. This is an important distinction to know.