What’s the Google dance? Well, it’s really just a fun phrase for when Google updates its index. This occurs regularly, once a month, and can cause a lot of movement in rankings, meaning that it’s come to be feared by many in the SEO industry and anticipated by others. The update isn’t just one sudden switch, though, as each index update takes several days to complete. During this update the searches seem to ‘dance’ between the old index and new index – that’s the Google dance.

So why does it happen? Well, Google pulls its results from over ten thousand servers, and they can’t all be updated at once – Google would have to go down for the update. Instead, each server is updated with the new index, one at a time. This can cause very strange behavior in the page rank process if two major sites located on separate servers happen to have a close linking bond. These sorts of separations are interesting and can contribute to a great deal of change and motion in page ranks. The most important thing to keep in mind is that eventually Google will get you into your proper place.

Generally, if you behave, you will not be thrown down for long by the odd activity that can occur when Google is in the process of updating its index for your server (or for the servers of your favorite link partners.

One common misunderstanding is the idea that Google controls which server each kind of information is coming from, and so stores similar information on the same server. Google’s index doesn’t work this way – it’s a big, disorganized mass of information that Google searches very quickly.

This is a blessing in disguise because it allows your site to remain reachable via other sites that are related to it when the index is taking place. Your site generally won’t suffer for too long when an update is taking place anyway, but if you are heavily dependent on Google results, you will see a slight drop for a short period of time. This drop is often followed by a slight spike especially if your page rank has increased since the last index.

The 10,000 servers that Google uses are distributed between seven datacenters all over the world. Google doesn’t keep all of those eggs in one basket – they want to be able to lose one datacenter and have the rest survive. If part of Google goes down, people can still use the search engine and as I said before, this allows your site to be accessed via related sites if the server holding your sites index happens to go down.

The datacenters that Google has put into play are enormous in comparison to most datacenters around the world. Google rivals some of the largest datacenters in the world with each of its datacenters and is probably the largest in the world if all were combined into one.

You see, the ‘time-to-live’ for www.google.com is only five minutes – that means that Google’s IP address can change every five minutes. This allows them to switch between their datacenters regularly, spreading the search load between them intelligently and routing around any damage. If you constantly entered the same datacenter with every search that you placed it would almost certainly fry within twenty four hours. Considering the number of users on Google each and every day, it is surprising that ten thousand servers is enough. A server can only handle so much traffic in a day and Google insures that it can hold more than any other service on the internet.

The datacenters updating their indexes at different times causes Google to do its dance. Unless you’re looking for your website’s ranking, you’d never notice this as your site is normally available at all times. The unfortunate bit is that often times you will lose your page ranking for a short period of time or your site will seem to have a lower number of pages indexed by Google. If you insure that you have several hundred pages available on Google at all times you will most likely be able to provide all of your content at all times either directly or indirectly.

To understand how to avoid stop words, you first have to understand what stop words are. Search engines have words or phrases that are considered ‘stop words’. When a spider or crawler encounters one of these stop words, they will immediately leave your website and any information they gathered from it will not be saved in their database. This means that your website will not be indexed. If your website is already indexed in a searched engine, the crawler will come back to see if there are updates — and if it finds stop words when it does this, then your site could get banned from the search engine. You will not be allowed to remove the words and re-submit: it’s too late.
   
Different search engines have different lists, but some are nearly universal – usually words that refer to sites with graphic sexual content, or other ‘adult’ material. We can’t really put a list here, or you’d never find this page! You should be able to tell what they are for the most part, but remember, pornographic web sites will often get indexed as well.

The norm for search engines is that they will attempt to avoid content that is illegal. When they encounter adult oriented sites, they will generally only ban sites that contain especially vulgar or illegal materials. The problem being that many of these sorts of sites will use “gateway” pages that have no content other than “click here to enter.” These sites are less likely to be caught with the stop word censors.

These aren’t the only stop words, however. Some search engines create different lists of stop words for each different kind of website. What does this mean? Well, the algorithms which rank the pages determine how many times on a page a keyword is listed. Keep in mind that there are people trying to keyword stuff their pages to improve their ranking. If a word is not relevant to your site, don’t list it in your key words. This is one easy way to avoid losing your index privileges. There is no reason to try to lure people into your site on key words that don’t apply as they will not stick around long enough to provide you with revenue anyway.

Now you might be asking what keyword stuffing is. Keyword stuffing is when someone uses the same keywords over and over again in the meta tags and the content of the web page. If you’re searching the web and you come across a website that seems to be ranked far too highly, then keyword stuffing is usually to blame. The search engines work hard to stop people from using these kinds of tactics, and usually de-list sites that they find to be using them. That’s why some sites can be listed near the top for a while, before one day seemingly disappearing altogether.

Some sites, however, get ejected for repeated keywords, even though these sites aren’t trying to keyword stuff. This is where keyword analysis comes into play. To avoid repeating the same word or phrase too many times, you need to analyze your pages before you submit them – you wouldn’t want your efforts at finding good keywords to go to waste.

Although search engine optimization is a long-term effort, the processes and rules change frequently, without any warning. There are, however, tools available that will help you to stay on top of what’s going on in SEO. Many tools can be tried out at no cost, letting you try before you buy. There are so many to choose from that you can’t just start downloading them – you will want to read the information on each tool before you make a decision.

By using these tools before you submit your pages to any search engines, you will fully understand "stop words" and how to avoid them! You need to keep in mind, though, that different search engines have different stop word lists, so words that don’t matter to one search engine can stop your site from being listed on another.

There are also some words that aren’t included in searches, such as ‘and’, ‘of’, ‘the’, and other small words. You should keep these words out of your meta tags, as they’re just a waste of space.

Search engine rankings are an important factor to consider when you have a website that needs more traffic. If your website doesn’t have a good position in the rankings then no-one will find it, so you need to make sure that your website is ranked highly enough to be seen. The other important quality to getting high traffic to your site is having a nice arsenal of links. The more links that you have to your site the more traffic you will get, but also, the more links to your site the more search engines like your site. Keeping a nice supply of links pointing at your site requires similar precautions and practices as getting high search engine listings.

Although no SEO company can guarantee a high ranking for your site, here are some tips for raising your search engine ranking. Using these tips will not get you to the top unless your site is the best out there, but they will at least put you into the positioning that you truly deserve. After all, the internet is basically a free market. You will naturally flow into the place that you deserve and many search engines try to insure that you do not rise above or fall below this position. This is why they are so strict, and this is why you must keep yourself on good terms with them.

1) Content is an important factor in high search engine rankings. Make sure that you have plenty of content throughout your site with your target keywords in the articles. It’s also worth doing a search for websites similar to yours and taking a look at their articles for ideas. The more content you have the better. It is generally a good idea to have between three hundred and five hundred words per page, but more important than a quantity of content is the quality of the content that you are providing. You cannot just put out three hundred words of jargon and expect your visitors to find it interesting and stick around for the long haul.

2) Your website’s URL can help you rank higher with the search engines if it contains your keywords. However, don’t think that naming your site after your keywords will always help your rankings – you need to do more than just that.

3) Search terms should be written out in text, instead of graphics. If you do use pictures, be sure to give them alt tags. The alt tags in your pictures are almost as important as text. It’s also a good idea to put some of your key words in links to other pages. In the eyes of a search engine it is almost as good to have a link to a page full of the content that the visitor is looking for as it is to have the content that the visitor is looking for on your page. If a visitor is looking for something that you are linking to and he or she finds your page, they may look around your site on the way through.

4) The title of your page is very important, and making sure that you choose it wisely will make a big difference. Terms such ‘free article on safe children's toys’, or ‘contact the children's toy expert today’ are good to use as titles, for example – they would get you a high ranking. The title area is the most important place to include your keyword phrases, so make sure that you put them all in.

5) The navigation menu that appears on each page of your website should include your page’s title.

6) Don’t just use the most popular keyword phrases – the market is so competitive that you should be sure to include some niche keywords too.

7) Make sure that you don’t have a lot of irrelevant links on your site. The more closely related to your site your links are, the better your chances of being ranked in a higher position.

You need to periodically update the content of your website, even if it’s only a slight change, as websites like sites that are kept updated.

9) You need to consider the fact most search engines don’t like automatic submissions or multiple submissions – submit once, manually.

10) Always be on the look out for SEO news – staying up to date and using the latest techniques will help you stay one step ahead of your competition.