One of the top concerns of any new website (such as mine) is how will you attract a readership. The most common way that random people will be able to visit your site (and even know it exists) is through search engines. I’ve been passing my website URL around and advertising through MSN and I’ve been getting decent traffic. Also I’d like to thank several of my friend who have been linking to me. See, the most common way that people usually find websites are through search engines like Google, and recently blogs through Technorati. I’m pleased to announce that I now have the number 1 place for both Google searches of “Jeffrey Aho” and “Jeff Aho“. (Heh…this post will actually help more :) )

The fact is, the better your place on search engines results for keywords that relate to your site, the more traffic you will receive. That makes placing high in results one of a webmaster’s key goals (especially if it is a business! Traffic is profit!). Search engines run software. This software is founded on a set of rules and criteria how it relates the most relevant websites to keywords. That means they can be exploited to give you better results. The one catch is that most of these criteria are out of the reach of the webmaster to exploit. These include the number of links from other sites which you generally can’t control. (Actually Mike suggested I post on some influential blogs with my URL, thus creating more links) There are however several things that you can do to give you a head start.

Google was revolutionary because of the technology that it used to search the web with. It worked so well that it stole business from it’s rival Yahoo. Google uses a set of algorithms collectively called PageRank which grade a website’s relevance and popularity. By knowing the specific criteria that PageRank uses, a webmaster can improve the position of their site. While Google has a page where you can submit your URL to them, the reality is all it does is sent a bot to view the page and in the end rank it. The real way to get business is to take advantage of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) factors that Google uses. Several of them can be exploited by a webmaster through the code that they write.

These factors all contribute to the way Google views your web page. It actually gives you a rank…a PageRank. For example, (you can check yours out if you have a web page), mine is ranked 0 (which isn’t surprising because I just launched it) while Mike’s is 5. This results in Mike’s site coming up before mine when searching a related topic on both, like Mechatronics. The thing is, PageRank is mostly based on linking to other sites, and there is quite a few other factors that are considered. These additional SEO Factors play a large role and are weighted compared to each other. For Google (see link), some of the big additional factors are having the keyword in the title domain, and in meta tags. I recently added meta tags to my site just to give it a little extra boost. I can only hope they help me out (even a little).

An example of these other factors playing a big role is how the Tron Eng ‘10 class (Which ironically doesn’t even exist yet and is only the work of a very initiative filled future student) beats our class, Tron Eng ‘09 (The most active class website in UW Eng!) when “UW Mechatronics” is googled. How can this be? Tron Eng ’09’s PageRank is 3 compared to Tron Eng ’10’s PageRank of 0 is clearly more. If you look at the list, keywords in the title are very high up, so it gives Tron Eng ‘10 the advantage (by a few results pages!)…when clearly we are the better site to visit. :)

It seems I lucked out with my domain being able to jump to first so easily. Probably because of my last name, Aho, which isn’t that common. To finish off, just a quick comment: I got the Genius Bowl directorship, so I’m quite happy. Genius Bowl is a termly engineering quiz event to find the “smartest class in engineering” and I’ll be partly responsible for organizing it. :) Back to studying…:( (0/6 exams)

Currently Listening to: “Thief” - Our Lady Peace