Helping Spiders Crawl Through Your Web Site

The World Wide Web has made the spread of information and ideas easy and accessible to millions. It’s the place where everyone has an opportunity to be heard—that is, if you can be found amidst the multitude of other Web sites out there.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of making your Web site accessible to people using search engines to find services you provide. Search engines (such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN) operate by providing users with a list of relevant search results based on keywords users enter. This allows people who don’t know your Web site address to find your site through keyword searches.

Thousands (sometimes millions) of results may be populated for any given keyword search. These results are generated by spiders. Spiders are programs that crawl through Web sites looking for information to help search engines properly index each site. This indexing allows search engines to provide users with relevant Web site links when keywords are typed into the search engine.

But with hundreds, if not thousands of people, offering services just like yours, how do you make sure that search engines see your site as one of the most relevant sites for a specific search? SEO allows you to create a site that is appealing to not only your potential clients, but to search engine spiders that make your site accessible to your targeted audience. Spiders, just like your customers, are looking for specific information and usability features—and SonicSEO.com can help you develop a Web site that will satisfy both the search engine spiders and your targeted audience.

Spiders are designed to crawl through Web sites much like humans. That means they do not search deep into a site and do not spend much time on any given page. Also, each search engine has its own dynamic algorithm, or method of calculation, used to determine site relevancy and search result ranking. Search engines do not publish their algorithms for fear of abuse; however, there are certain features that most search engines utilize in their algorithms even if the weighted value of each feature is unknown.

Some basic features of Web sites that search engine spiders look for are:

• Keyword usage
• Keyword placement
• Compelling content
• HTML title tags, meta-descriptions and keyword tags
• External and internal links
• Site updates
• Site map
• Web design
• Functionality

Don’t let the simplicity of these basic algorithm features fool you. Effective keyword usage is not simply based on repeating a keyword or phrase over and over on your Web site. In fact, this (and other misuse) can get you permanently banned from some search engines, paralyzing your ability to run an effective online marketing campaign for your firm (see The Black Hat of SEO: Unveiling the Bogus Claims of Bad SEO Firms).

SEO is a craft. And good SEO will help your site list high on search engine results pages without violating search engine optimization policies. Often times, this means targeting a few researched keywords or phrases, developing strong content and creating an effective architecture for your site. Getting your Web site to the top of the search engines takes time, and keeping it there demands maintenance and monitoring. At SonicSEO.com, we not only help you develop a strong online presence for your Web site, but we help you maintain that presence with continual monitoring and updating.

Don’t get lost on the Web. Make your site easily accessible to potential clients by utilizing SEO techniques that feed the spiders what they need to recognize your site as highly relevant. Contact SonicSEO.com at 888-437-3737 to start optimizing your Web site today!