When we talk about search engine spiders, we are not referring to
common, garden variety arachnids - and not even to exotic black widows
or tarantulas. Instead, we are talking about the electronic signals that
search engines send to crawl all over the internet, collecting data
about websites. This data, in turn, drives the results of keyword
searches.
Spiders are also known as "bots". They penetrate a website and copy information that is sent back to the search engine's database. All the major search engines - Bing, Yahoo! Search, Google, etc. - use this technology. Once on a website page, a spider records links and dispatches additional spiders to follow them and copy the content that they find there. The process is continual and results in huge search engine databases of tens of billions of pieces of information.
In order to take advantage of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), you need to know how these crafty bots work. It will be to your advantage whether you post specialized, high quality content or bulk content. Think of how you read a newspaper. You begin at the top left hand corner and move across the page of newsprint. When reading columns, you begin with the left hand column and read down to the bottom. Then you move to the next column on the right, and so on. Spiders read websites in exactly the same manner.
Nothing on the internet escapes these intelligent spiders. In addition, they can analyze a theme or topic that they find on a page, and they can use this information to determine how pages that are linked together relate topically. However, they are unable to process certain subtleties, like a particular intent that may be required to understand a theme or relationship.
Because spiders are important to internet search, you need to build your website in a way that facilitates their navigation of it. To provide a clear way for the spider, build strong links on every page of your site or on the Navigation Menu's key pages. Build at least one link to access a site map. This should be text based and should provide a listing of each page on the site with corresponding links. (Google can also use SML site maps.) Contrary to popular belief, site maps are not for the human site visitor. Instead, they are used to provide information to search engine bots.
Spiders are also known as "bots". They penetrate a website and copy information that is sent back to the search engine's database. All the major search engines - Bing, Yahoo! Search, Google, etc. - use this technology. Once on a website page, a spider records links and dispatches additional spiders to follow them and copy the content that they find there. The process is continual and results in huge search engine databases of tens of billions of pieces of information.
In order to take advantage of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), you need to know how these crafty bots work. It will be to your advantage whether you post specialized, high quality content or bulk content. Think of how you read a newspaper. You begin at the top left hand corner and move across the page of newsprint. When reading columns, you begin with the left hand column and read down to the bottom. Then you move to the next column on the right, and so on. Spiders read websites in exactly the same manner.
Nothing on the internet escapes these intelligent spiders. In addition, they can analyze a theme or topic that they find on a page, and they can use this information to determine how pages that are linked together relate topically. However, they are unable to process certain subtleties, like a particular intent that may be required to understand a theme or relationship.
Because spiders are important to internet search, you need to build your website in a way that facilitates their navigation of it. To provide a clear way for the spider, build strong links on every page of your site or on the Navigation Menu's key pages. Build at least one link to access a site map. This should be text based and should provide a listing of each page on the site with corresponding links. (Google can also use SML site maps.) Contrary to popular belief, site maps are not for the human site visitor. Instead, they are used to provide information to search engine bots.
