Attack Of The Spiders! - Get Found By The Search Engine Web Crawlers

If your website is ever going to be found by your prospective customers, it must first be found by the search engines. When you realize the importance of search engines finding your site, you'll want to to understand what methods search engine companies use to keep an updated index of the content available.

There are some things you can include on your website to "feed the spiders" with what they want to see.
The huge amount of web pages that make up what we call the internet is constantly read, filtered, and sorted or judged by software programs called spiders, crawlers, or robots. The web spider use a mathematical formula called an 'algorithm' to help it decide not only what your page is about, but how relevant the content is to the main topic it perceives.

An additional part of the calculation involved in deciding where to rank your page in the list or index is based on external or off-page SEO factors. The most important off-page SEO factor for web spiders is a count of how many other web pages are linking to yours. This is a measurement of the popularity of your page, and maybe to a lesser extent, its quality.

Your page or site will probably be found by the search engine spiders eventually, even if you do nothing. It's a common practice though, to attempt to help the spiders or crawlers by notifying them of your web page or website when you enter its information on a URL submission page for that search engine. When the spider finds your site, it will read the meta tags, scan the text, and follow the links. In doing this, it is creating a kind of index of your site and how the pages relate to one another and to external pages.

This information is then placed in a central location on the search engine's server called the 'index'. This is the index that is constantly being updated, reordered, and altered.

The spider will eventually return to your site to check to see if any changes, deletions, or additions have happened since the last visit. You can help the spider by making and updating a special file called a 'sitemap'. This sitemap is an index or table of content that the spider can read and understand from your site, and if any changes have happened. The sitemap can also tell the spider how frequently it can expect certain pages to change or update.

Another way you can feed the spider is by using keywords properly. Keywords are not every possible word you can think of to tell what your page is about. Nor are they only to be used in the meta tag of that name. A keyword can be a phrase or single word, but either way, there should only be one main keyword your page is about, with one or two more related keywords.

Where you place the keywords is important as well, because placing them at the beginning of different page elements (title, headers, paragraphs) helps the spider understand the emphasis of the page.

If your site is well-written and focused around one main keyword, but that keyword isn't searched for very often, you simply will not get much traffic from search engines.

There have been different methods created to attempt to unduly influence the spiders to place a particular page or site in the index quicker and higher, but modern algorithms are usually able to sniff out these "black hat" SEO techniques and practically ignore the content that is created this way.

You can also direct the spider away form certain content with a text file named robots.txt. This file contains directions for the spider to avoid reading or indexing particular folders, files, or file types.
In the end, well-written, well-organized content coupled with common-sense basic html coding is the best food to give the spiders when they visit.

To your success,

Jonny Tyson