One of the most effective ways of getting search engine spiders and robots to notice your site is to use a number of content-rich articles on your site. If you manage to get the spiders to take notice of your site, you are well on your way to get your site noticed by prospective customers. It is generally accepted that being on the first page of search results will result in major traffic for your site, but in my experience a listing on any of the first five pages will see an increase in steady traffic to your site. A steady stream of targeted traffic will be invaluable particularly if you hope to earn a living from your site. Obviously the nearer the top of the search engine results that you can get your site, the better. In general the higher the ranking of your site in search engine results the greater the volume of visitors to your site.
Getting your site within the first five pages of search results for your chosen keywords is crucial. Getting it on the first page is fantastic! The best way to get there is to understand how spiders read the content of your site and your articles. Only a solid understanding of this will help you choose and position your content to best effect.
Spiders are mini software programs used by search engines to crawl the web. They follow links in your site but there are several other factors they consider:
- The structure of your articles
- What keywords appear in your articles
- Where keywords appear within your site
- How often keywords appear within your site.
- What sites you link to
- What sites link to yours
- Historical data about your site
All these factors determine your page rank within search engine results listings for your chosen keywords or phrases. To maximise the benefits spiders can offer your website you should choose your articles and content with these factors in mind.
It is particularly important to select the proper keywords or phrases. You must think carefully about what words or phrases your customers would use when searching for a product or service like yours. For example, if you run a caterers in Liverpool focusing on weddings, then the keywords you should look to include in your articles are – Liverpool Caterers, wedding caterers, Liverpool wedding caterers, wedding breakfasts and so on.
When you finalise your selection of keywords or phrases, you need to ensure you have placed them correctly within your site. Most spiders will apportion different weightings to different places within your site. The top four places to concentrate on maximising your keyword saturation are:
- Titles
- Subtitles
- Metatags (including keywords and descriptions)
- Linked text
Other factors play a part but search engines are notoriously secretive about where else on a website that keywords are beneficial. They may include image text tags, table headings and bullet points. Google will also crawl individual articles for keywords and give your article more credit should keywords appear throughout the article rather than just in the first paragraph or two.
Since no one knows the exact algorithms used by spiders, your concentration should be focused on the top four to ensure a successful crawl of your site by spiders. Optimising content can admittedly be a complex topic but it does not have to be perfect if you have selected the correct keywords AND your site focuses on a niche market.
You can do a number of other things to optimise your site.
- Increase the number of backlinks to your site from other sites, particularly those with related content.
- Update your site with fresh content regularly. Spiders love fresh homepage content in particular. You could list the last 3 articles uploaded to your site within your home page to satisfy the requirement for fresh content. At the very least you should update your content once a month.
- Don’t forget to place your keywords in metatags on every page of your site and not just the home page
- Use keywords wisely within the ALT tags of your images. For example, a picture of a wedding breakfast you have catered for should have an ALT tag similar to ‘Wedding Breakfast by Liverpool Wedding Caterers.
- Use proper headings when publishing a new article. Don’t just use Bold or Italic to signify a title.
- Have an xml site map so that the spiders find every page of your website.
If you systematically implement these ideas, you should effectively optimise your website for spiders.
