The term “spider” in search engine optimization refers to the way Google and other search engines look at your website. When a page gets indexed by a search engine, the search engine spiders crawl through your site and its contents almost like a human reads. The spiders do this insanely fast and they are very smart. The first thing the spider does is look at your title and your meta tags to determine what it is looking for. This is where you would have your keywords to let the search engine spider know what to look for as it crawls through your content. If you do not have any meta tags or keywords listed then the spider will most likely discard your site and move on. This is why it is extremely important to make sure you have proper meta tags and well-chosen keywords.
After the spider knows what to look for it will start to crawl through your content. They start in the upper left hand corner and read through the content looking for the keywords that it found in your meta tags. Try and bold keywords and the important parts of your content to show the spiders that these are important words or phrases. As I said before, the spiders are very smart so if you have a list of keywords or if your content is not actually relevant to the keywords then the spiders will count it as spam and this will only hurt your website, not help it. The spiders are similar to humans when they read so they can tell if the content does not make sense.
If you have clearly defined links in your content the spiders will follow these links to your other pages and crawl through them. You should put links to your important pages so the spiders will crawl through and see that you have multiple pages with the same or similar keywords and it will show that your website is actually about those keywords. This is where the bottom text navigation comes in. It is extremely important to have a bottom text link navigation with your important pages in it because this is the last area the spider goes, and you want the spider to follow the links and crawl all of your important pages. You should try and include your keywords in these bottom links or at least somewhere in the footer so the spider sees the keywords one last time before it leaves the page.
Things to avoid:
• Because the spider starts in the upper left corner, avoid putting flash or javascript as the first thing on your webpage because it is possible that the spider will see that mess of code first and get lost or just move on and not even look at your entire page.
• Make sure that most of your page has text in it. The spiders cannot read graphics, so if your page is comprised of mostly graphics then the spiders will have nothing to read.
• Avoid too much content. It is good to have a lot of content but if you have way too much on one page then the spider may skip a lot of it because it wants to be efficient.
• Don’t just list your keywords. The spiders are smart so they can tell if you are spamming your site with keywords. Try and space out every keyword throughout the content. Avoid putting two different keywords right next to each other.
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Contributor's Note
For more information about SEO or to contact us about our SEO or professional web design services, please visit our website: www.seocompatibledesign.com.
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