- The functioning of search engine robots
How do search engines publish results of a search so quickly? The answer is that they do not go out onto the web at the time of the search and try to locate the data. The data is already contained in their databases.
Search engines use robots (referred to as Spiders or Web Crawlers) to go out onto the web and index websites. They look for new websites or at previously existing sites for new content. Most search engines update their content on a monthly basis.
The following list identifies today's most popular spiders and to which search engine they can be identified:
- Google: Freshbot, GoogleBot and Backrub (Backrub is experimental)
- Yahoo: Slurp
- Inktomi: Slurp/2.0 (Note: Inktomi is owned by Yahoo)
- AltaVista: Scooter (Note: AltaVista is owned by Yahoo)
- EuroSeek: Arachnoidea
- Lycos: LyCos_Spider
Importance of a search engine-friendly design
Your website must have data and navigation that is search engine friendly in order for it to be included in the search engine databases.
Links and descriptive text must be easy for a spider to locate. Links that are included in images or Javascript menus do not work well for spiders. So what
needs to be done is if you have want ot have a Javascript menu is to also create a text link menu and place it on the bottom of the page so that the spider will find it and be able to navigate the site. For links that are embedded in graphics or pictures without description, make sure you create an alt tag text link. Doing this will ensure that the spiders will be able to find and index these specific pages and related content.
Creating a site map is another way of making certain that crawlers can index all the pages in your site. It is best to have the site map connected to your
homepage. The site map should be named with a filename called sitemap.html.
If you are launching a new website, if possible make sure you have some links from other sites linking to your site. Having inbound links from sites that have already been spidered will ensure the spiders will arrive at your site and discover that it is new and they will eventually index it in their database.
Optimizing web pages for relevant search terms
Keywords, key phrases and search terms are the important words or phrases that people type into the search box to find the products or services that interest them.
So when it comes to your website, keywords and key phrases are the words on your web pages that need to match these exact search terms in order for them to locate your website as part of their search effort.
Simple as it may seem, it takes effort to identify and select the relevant terms to include in your website.
You need to identify your target market and the terms they would use to find you. Often the use of less obvious search terms maximizes your search potential.
Keep in mind different users will use different search key phrases or keywords while searching, which will produce some entirely different results. The extent that you can determine the terms that the majority of web searchers looking for your products and services will use will be proportional to the success of your based marketing efforts. For example terms like best price and lowest price. If you do not have these terms in your keywords and you are using price as an advantage you will miss those people who use those search terms when looking for your product or service.
There needs to be relevance to the search terms and the content on the landing page. The final keywords used should describe and accurately represent the content and the relevance of the particular page in which they are placed.
For effective search engine optimization of your web site, keywords should be formulated for each and every single page. It is a big mistake to use the same title tags or just writing your company name in the title tags of all of your pages. Carefully identify and define the keywords and key phrases that best describe the content of each particular page.
Always keep the visitor in mind. Try to identify the keywords that someone will use to find sites similar to yours.
In addition, develop as much relevant content as well.
This is what other sites will find interesting about your site and potentially set up a link in their site to your web site. These "Inbound Links" to relevant content are an important factor used in the algorithms of many search engines such as Google to rank your site.
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