Getting Googled

Although I have been concentrating on the Alexa Rank of my sites, I am also very interested and keen on getting my sites ranked by Google.

Except for Google themsleves, nobody seems to know the exact criteria used by Google to rank sites. However, amongst the unknowns, there are a lot of known criteria, so of course everyone concentrates on them.

Google doesn't want to list junk sites because they are no use to anyone, so content is very important to Google, as it should be. To this end, I had previously created static web pages so that all of my content was there in plain HTML for the search engines to see and index.

Since then, I have discovered the wonders of PHP scripts and MySQL databases and dynamic pages. This means I have fewer actual pages on my site, but several of those pages have content added to them dynamically (on request), and that content comes from my database.

Not to worry though. Google does index dynamic pages as long as it knows how to access them.

Dynamic pages usually have a list of one or more details added to the page address, like this (I've highlighted the details):
http://www.cafetorium.co.uk/product.php?products_id=108&osCsid=8eea7

This means "load the page called product.php, and fill it with product data from the database, where the product ID is 108&osCsid=8eea7".
The product could be an article for sale, an article - anything really.
Here's the address again as a real link:
Blogging Secrets

Anyway, as long as you give Google all the possible combinations of product details, the resulting pages will be indexed.
Fortunately, on sales pages, those links exist, and
The Cafetorium has a list of all products, where all those links will appear in one page.

For good measure, I always create and submit Google Sitemaps for all of my sites, which tells Google all the pages that are available.

And finally, if you wonder why I put links to my site in this blog, it's not for the convenience of readers, nor as blatant publicity. It's because Google indexes the Blogging sites (especially Blogger), and it's a good way for Google to find links to pages.