Your site promotion involves optimizing your website to attract search engine spiders. Before you can build a website that is friendly to spiders, you need to know how a bot sees your website.
Search engines are not actually crawling spiders but small software bots that a search engine sends out to get your webpages after submission your URL to it. A search engine spider can also access to your site if many sites link to your site as well.
Once a bot is sent to your web site it starts the webpage indexing process by reading all the content in the body of the web page. It as well reads the complete HTML, anchor tags, photo text and links to all internal and external webpages.
Search engine then copies this info back to its main database for indexing at a later date. This practice on common is thought to take something about two or three months but sometimes that can cause this to take longer.
Only Text
A search spider looks at your website much like a text webbrowser does. It likes text and ignores info contained in images. Bots enjoy reading about the images if you supply ALT descriptions. This is a great frustration to Web designers who carefully design complex splash pages with many attractive images, but very little text content.
Search bots are really blind to any text. They can follow only HTML code. If you have a form or javascript or anything else that can block a search spider from reading your HTML code then the spider will simply ignore it.
What BOTs Want To See
A search engine rambles through your pages looking for a range of components. When it locates and catalogs everything, the bot scores every page for relevancy using own algorithm.
Spiders guard their algorithm and modify them regularly to battle spammers. It’s hard to design a web page that will get good position in all engines, but you can increase your advantage by including these elements:
- Keywords
- META tags
- TITLE tags
- Links
- Header tags
- Bold text
Read Like a Search Bot
Evaluate your web page structure and flow several ways. Looking at it in a webbrowser is the easiest technique, but also the least successful. It’s not easy to evaluate your own web page neutrally.
Another alternative is to look at how your webpage displays in a text browser. Look that the simulation, then consider reading it aloud. That gives you an idea of how your Web page might sound to someone using a screen reader. It’s one quick way to check the overall accessibility of your page.
To see what a search spider sees when it comes to get and index your pages try accessing your web site from a Unix server. You will be able to see your website in the way that a search engine spider does – without images, javascripts and complex href tags. If your page is not well-designed by this type of server then your website will surely be degraded in the eyes of the search spiders. This can result in a lower search engine ranking and a lower webpage popularity.
Want to learn more…?
Contact Belle Media today to discuss Search Engine Optimization.
Thank you to SEO Mastering for this detailed information.
