| |
| |
|
SEO Information |
|
|
|
Search Engine Robots - How They Work, What They Do (Part II)
If your site isn't found in the search engines, it is probably because the robots couldn't deal with it. It could be something as simple as not being able to find the site, or it may be more complicated issues involving the robot's not being able to crawl the site or figure out what your pages are all about. Submitting your site to the major search engines: that will help with the "can't find it" problem. Even having links pointing back to your site can be enough to attract the search engine robots. Google, for example, suggests that you may not have to submit your pages; they will find your site if you have a link pointing back to it from at least one other site on the web. If the robots can find your site but can't make sense of it, then you may need to look at the content and technology used on your pages. Frames, Flash, dynamically generated pages, and invalid HTML source code can cause problems when the search engine robot tries to access your web pages. While some search engines are beginning to be able to index dynamically generated pages and Flash (e.g. Google and AllTheWeb), use of some of these technologies can hinder your ability to be indexed by the search engine robots. Text in images cannot be read by the search engine robots. Using ALT image text is an important way to help the robots "read" your images. Websites with extensive images rely heavily on ALT text to present their content. How Do I Get The Most Out Of Indexing? If you know what to "feed" the spidering robots you will help yourself with search engine ranking. Having a website full of good content is the major factor. Search engines exist to serve their visitors, not to rank your website. You need to be sure to present yourself in your site in the way that will be most useful to the search engine visitor. Each search engine has its own idea of what is important in a page, but they all value text highly. Making sure that the text on your pages includes your most important keyword phrases will help the search engine evaluate the content of those pages. Making sure that you have good title and meta tags will further assist the search engines in understanding what your page is about. If the text on the page is about widgets, the title is about widgets, and the meta tags are about widgets, the search engine will have a pretty good idea that you are all about widgets. When their visitors search for widgets, the search engines know to list your site in the results. A sitemap page is a very good way of giving the search engine robot every opportunity to reach your website pages. Since robots click through the links of your web pages, make sure that at least your most important pages are included in the sitemap; you may even want to include all your pages there, depending on the size of your site. Be sure to add a link to the sitemap page from each page on your site. Another important consideration is that of keeping all of your pages within a small number of "clicks" from your top page. Many robots will not follow links more than two or three levels deep, so if your "widgets" page can only be reached from your home page by following multiple links (e.g. home page >> about us page >> products page >> widgets page), the robot may not crawl deep enough to get to the widgets page. Testing Your Website For Search Engine Robot Accessibility To get an idea just what the search engine robot "sees" on your page, you can look at the Sim Spider tool. You may be surprised at how different your site looks to the robot. You can find this tool at http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/sim_spider.cgi You will see text and ALT image text show up in the results. If your entire website is built in Flash, you will see nothing at all because robots don't understand Flash movies. The Bottom Line When it comes to search engine robots, think simply. Lots of good content and text, hyperlinks the robots can follow, optimization of your pages, topical links pointing back to your site and a sitemap will help insure the best results when the robots come visiting. Resources *SpiderSpotting - Search Engine Watch http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/spiders.html *Robotstxt.org List of robots and protocols for setting up a robots.txt file. http://www.robotstxt.org/ *Spider-Food Tutorials, forums and articles about Search Engine spiders and Search Engine Marketing. http://spider-food.net/ *Spiderhunter.com Articles and resources about tracking Search Engine spiders. http://www.spiderhunter.com/ *Sim Spider Search Engine Robot Simulator Search Engine World has a spider that simulates what the Search Engine robots read from your website. http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/sim_spider.cgi Daria Goetsch is the founder and Search Engine Marketing Consultant for Search Innovation Marketing, a Search Engine Optimization company serving small businesses. She has specialized in Search Engine Promotion since 1998, including three years as the Search Engine Specialist for O'Reilly Media, Inc., a technical book publishing company. Copyright © 2002-2005 Search Innovation Marketing. http://www.searchinnovation.com All Rights Reserved. Permission to reprint this article is granted if the article is reproduced in its entirety, without editing, including the bio information. Please include a hyperlink to http://www.searchinnovation.com when using this article in newsletters or online.
MORE RESOURCES:
SEO - Google News |
|
|
|
RELATED ARTICLES
7 Steps to Highly Relevant, Search Engine Friendly, and People Useful Web Site Content The task is to build a Content Rich Search Friendly and People Friendly Web Site Quickly. These 7 Steps will show you how with about 10 Hours work you can build over 50 pages of rich, Search Engine relevant content for your web SiteStep 1 - What is Your Web Site's Main ThemeThis is a Fairly easy step. MLM and SEO - Bad Business! No Business! MLM has been around way before the Internet. It is a few steps above a chain letter. Do-It-Yourself Search Engine Optimization Search engine optimization, or SEO, is big business. If you rely on search engines to bring visitors to your business website, you need to rely on more than luck. 3 Deadly Search Engine Marketing Sins My inbox this week provided glaring examples of three all too common rookie search engine marketing mistakes. What you could call three deadly search engine marketing sins. Keywords, Choose Them Wisely By now you have likely heard that keywords and keyword phrases, are extremely important in having search engines display your website. So how do you choose them? Guess? Ask a friend? Check successful competitors sites? There is a better way!First let's digress. How to Avoid the Google Duplicate Content Filter? More and more webmasters are building websites with publicly available content (data feeds, news feeds, articles). This results in websites with duplicate content on the Internet. Tools of the Trade, the SEO Must Have Utilities Search Engine traffic accounts for nearly 80% of the Internet traffic. It is no wonder all website owners want their pages appear in the first 3 pages of the Search engine Results Pages ( SERPS). Whats the Big Hurry? Quite often I get asked what the magic solution is for getting better Google ranking. Sometimes the questions sound fairly naive, something like this:"I have recently established a site called wazooski. Lets Make Your Website #1 Their is simple way of making your website rank top and search optimized.Step 1. Part I : Getting Free Hits Using These Simple Tips & Tricks Search Engine OptimizationSearch engines still remain the #1 tool to generate free targeted traffic to any website, so make sure that your site is indexed in every major search engine. Do a through check of all the meta tags and make sure you are not missing any one. Google Tests Expanded Search To Include Printed Works Google Labs is currently testing Google Print, which returns results from within scanned printed books along with Google's standard web search results. The searcher doesn't have to do anything special - the printed work results are already included in the Google database. Google Rankings -- Achieve Top 10 Rankings with Free Tools In order to get a top 10 google ranking it is imperative to not only know how to use the resources that are available to us, but to also know what to do with them. The key is always to find out what tools are the ones to use. Reciprocal Linking Scams, What to Look for and How to Avoid Them Reciprocal linking scams have increased immensely during the past year. Initially we thought that this problem only related to gambling and casino related websites but an audit of our commercial link partners suggests that it is a serious problem within the broader online community. Link Exchange Tips, No Tricks Use text links, avoid image links. Anyhow, if you have used image links, then always make sure to put your keywords in the alt tags. How to Get Listed in Yahoo Within 48 Hours, Without Paying $299 First of all you need to get a blog. If you don't have one yet, you can get one for free by going to www. World of Website Promotion Website promotion is a big and ongoing process. Every person who has website should have little knowledge about various elements involved in website promotion even if he had hired a SEO. The Importance of Correct HTML Syntax in Search Engine Positoning There is a lot of competition to get good spots in the search engines. Proper html syntax and a clean code will help toward better positoning. Link Reputation - How to Improve Search Engine Rankings One of the most overlooked strategies to improve search engine rankings is building your link reputation. This link popularity strategy is just as important or equal to creating keyword rich content pages. How Search Engines Connect Sellers and Buyers Maggie knows how to find what she wants. She lets her fingers do the walking - not in the Yellow Pages, but at Google. Martial Arts Webmasters: Time to Optimize Your Site! A few months ago I was looking through the search engines to see if my website was even found for certain keywords. Well it wasn't.
|
| home | site map |
| © 2006 |
