The First Hurdle: Making Your Site Search Spider Friendly
Posted on | February 3, 2004 | No Comments
Chapter 1 – The First Hurdle: Making Your Site Search Spider Friendly
There are many aspects of your web pages you can change in order to make them more friendly to the search spiders.
Keywords
Selecting the right keyword phrases – the ones your target market is most likely to use when searching for the products you sell – is an artform unto itself. You can learn more about keyword research here.
For the purposes of this article, let’s just say that the keywords you select and put in your meta tags, your on-page content, and in your incoming links will play a big role in how the engines index and rank your site… so choose wisely! Read on to find out more.
If you want the search spiders to come crawling to your door, put your top keyword phrases in your title tag, description tag, and (optionally) in your keyword tag. These days, few search spiders bother reading the keyword tag so its importance has diminished, but the title tag is highly revered by a search engine and should contain your top one or two keyword terms.
The description tag is shown in the search results returned by some engines, so it needs to be written like a mini-advertisement for human readers as well as optimized for web crawler action. You can learn more about Meta Tags here.
Content
The content of a website has become so important to a search engine that very often the first job an SEO tackles, right after selecting keywords, is ensuring the text of each page is search optimized… in other words, the copy has been skillfully peppered with the selected keyword terms.
Every search engine counts keywords in content, giving them a convenient tool (one among many) to help them match a webpage with a search query. You can learn more about content optimization here.
Behind the Scenes
Factors hidden in your site’s HTML code can block search spiders, so any search optimization professional worth his/her salt will check your code to make sure it’s accessible. They will look for impediments such as flash-based programs, dynamic databases, frames or text embedded in graphics, all of which can render a site less web crawler friendly.
Responsible SEOs will also remove any spammy tricks they find in your code and discourage you from using dubious tactics such as invisible text loaded with keywords. These short-term fixes can have long term negative consequences if a search engine catches up with you.
These days, many SEOs also encourage the use of site maps to help the search engine spiders navigate from your home page to your inside pages – especially important if your menus don’t use text links.
Off-page Factors
This includes things like link popularity and click-throughs. Search engine spiders analyze how pages link to each other and gage the importance of a linking page as a factor in determining your rankings.
And lately the engines have become increasingly adept at filtering out linking strategies they deem suspicious or artificial. Your best bet is one-way, unpaid links from high-ranking sites related to yours… in other words, relevant and important sites.
In fact, each major search engine has become so obsessed with “importance” they even monitor click-throughs, dropping the ranking of pages that don’t get a lot of visitors and promoting pages that do… just one more way in which your site is rewarded or punished depending on its search engine traffic.
Click here to find out more about what search spiders are and how they crawl your website.
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